


last night, in tokyo

by 4x01welcometokorea



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: BJ rolls up in Maine is OTE (one true ending), I didn't mean to bring My Slight Fetish for Hands into this but there's no denying it happened, M/M, They love each other, hot mash summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26098495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/4x01welcometokorea/pseuds/4x01welcometokorea
Summary: Hawkeye gets back from Korea in July, BJ shows up at his doorstep one night in November. In the time between, Hawkeye writes letters he doesn't send, he forgets a night in Tokyo he shouldn't remember, and he remembers he doesn't like Rice Krispies.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, Peg Hunnicutt/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 52
Kudos: 234





	1. Chapter 1

Hawkeye gets home from Korea in late July. In the years to come he can never remember a single thing about his first two weeks back. He remembers hugging his dad at the airport, he remembers the car ride back home. And then nothing for two weeks.

The way dad tells it later, he slept, he ate some toast if offered, slept some more, and stared off into the distance. The way B.J. tells it later—even though he wasn’t there—especially when he’s feeling particularly corny and in the mood to tease Hawkeye, “ _Poor Hawk was lovesick. It’s a real medical condition, I swear. I’m a doctor and everything.”_

Many years later, he’s sitting with B.J. in the kitchen of a fancy apartment in Russian Hill, one of those that overlooks the San Francisco skyline and the water beyond it. They’re drinking with a few of their friendly acquaintances, and a few of their friends. A guy named Alain—a psychiatrist at UCSF—tells him that’s how the brain deals with trauma. “You kept up your good spirits in Korea because it wasn’t safe to fall apart. The minute you were back in Maine, it was safe to breakdown, so you did. It’s a survival mechanism,” Alain tells him.

He and B.J. share a dark look at that.

“Oh, don’t think Maine is special. I fell apart plenty in Korea too, just ask this one,” Hawk tells them all. It’s not funny but he says it like it’s funny, so everyone but B.J. laughs. He and B.J. silently promise each other never to hang out with people who own fancy apartments in Russian Hill again.

Anyway, for whatever reason, his first two weeks back from Korea are a black hole. At the start of week three, his dad brings him the mail, his usual paper, and a postcard from B.J. that has a funny looking drawing of a sea lion on the front and a scribbled note on the back.

_Hi Hawk—Miss ya already. I’d been meaning to write earlier but I can’t bring myself to put Erin down for a second. She’s so smart and funny. I’m not just saying this because she has my genes, Hawk. You’d love her. And she’d love you. I can’t wait for you to meet her._

_How’re you? How’s your dad? Everything good in Crabapple Cove? Listen, I was hoping to visit in a couple of weeks, but there’s a lot I need to take care of here first. No chance you’re gonna be around in California any time soon, huh? Guess not. I’ll see you when I get out there. Soon, I promise._

_All my love,_

_Your Beej_

Hawkeye bolts up straight and reads the note about five more times in a row.

When he’d let himself hope that B.J. would write, he imagined it happening months (sometimes years) in the future. But here it is. A letter from B.J. Only a couple of weeks since they’d last seen each other. Does B.J. miss him? Is he only writing out of some sense of obligation because he knows Hawkeye will be lonely? 

He traces the last two lines with his thumb. Over and over. “All my love, _your_ Beej.” What the hell does “your Beej” mean? B.J. isn’t _his_ in any sense of the word. This is evidenced by the fact that Hawk is currently completely Beej-less and Peg is up to her neck in Beej. She’s swimming in Beej!

The postcard leaves him with mixed feelings, but at least it leaves him feeling _something_. That night he goes downstairs and eats at the table with his dad for the first time since he got back.

“Sorry it ain’t much, pal. If I’d known you were gonna pick tonight to rouse from your coma, I’d have bought some meat to throw on the grill,” his dad says, piling spaghetti and sauce on his plate.

“Are you kidding? This is real pasta, with real cheese. You would be a millionaire selling this stuff in Korea,” Hawkeye says with his mouth full.

Dad looks at him with great affection. “I was gonna give you one more week to wallow, and then I was gonna throw water on you and drag you out of that nest you made up there,” his dad says. “He’s a good friend, huh?”

Hawkeye isn’t a fan of his dad’s knowing tone, but he’s not about to deny the truth.

“Beej? The best. He kept me sane there,” he admits with a shrug. “It figures that he’d have that same effect here.”

“You should go out and give him a visit. Sounds like he wants you to,” his dad suggests.

“Dad! You read my mail?”

“Well, I didn’t realize it was yours at first.”

“It has my name on it!”

“Oh come on. I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you. How about I buy you a plane ticket so you can go have some fun with your friend? You deserve it. You haven’t had any real fun in three years.”

“Dad I’ve been back barely three weeks. B.J. even less. He has a wife and kid. You met them, remember? I can’t just show up as they’re putting their life together and drag him away to play hooky,” he snaps, suddenly irrationally angry. He suddenly wants to throw the plate of spaghetti across the room like a frisbee.

His dad doesn’t say anything, just pours him more wine.

“I’m sorry,” Hawkeye says after a moment. “I’m sorry, dad. I’m still a little—It was a good idea. We all just need to focus on getting back to regular life, okay?”

Dad smiles, conciliatory. “Well that’s very mature and considerate of you. War must be worse than I thought. At least write the boy back soon, will you?”

“Yeah, of course, of course,” Hawkeye says, waving his dad’s concern away. He feels the postcard burning a hole in his pocket. He’s not so sure it’s a good idea to write back.

“Good. Now. I have another confession to make. Don’t get mad, okay?”

“Dad, what did you do?”

“Just bought my favorite son a car.”

“Dad! You didn’t,” Hawkeye says, aghast. “And I’m your only son,” he adds as an aside because it’s an obligatory call-and-response joke.

“All the more reason for my only favorite son not to go into debt buying a dinky little car when his father has a semi-thriving medical practice,” his dad says.

“Dad, I’m a grown man in his thirties. I’m supposed to be taking care of you, not the other way around.”

“I’m only 63. I’m not an ailing old man, buddy.”

They stare at each other for a long time.

“Dad, I don’t know what to say.”

“Say ‘thank you, dad.’”

“Thank you, dad.” And then because he can’t help himself: “You really shouldn’t have!! That’s your retirement money.”

Dad looks at him for a long time. “You’ve always been like this, Ben. Since you were little. You’d do anything for anyone. You’d give the coat off your back to a stranger, but you never think you’re worth anyone else’s time or money.”

“Dad,” he whines, embarrassed. He stares straight into his pasta.

“Let me say this just one time. They sent my son to get shot at and hate other human beings, and he came back whole...in every way,” his dad says, sounding a little choked up. “I’m so proud of you. You’re been the best son a guy could ask for. You took care of me after your mom. In college and med school, you always wrote, you always called, you always made sure I didn’t get lonely. You never thought you were too good for a little poker night at your pop’s house.”

“Dad, stop. I just did what any normal person would do. You’re a good dad, it’s all,” he says, playing with the spaghetti on his plate and trying not to cry.

“And that’s the most special thing about you. You have this extraordinary kindness, but you see it as nothing more than a basic sense of decency.”

“ _Dad_ ,” he says, openly weeping now, crying harder than possibly ever before in his life. And when he looks up from the spaghetti, his dad is tearing up too.

“A talented young doctor like you? You’ll have your feet under you in no time. They pay above minimum wage for good surgeons stateside. So what if I wanted to buy my son a third-hand car so he can have a life in the meanwhile. Is that so bad? Is that something for you to be ashamed of?”

Hawkeye can’t stop crying now, he’s choking on it. “No, it’s not. Thanks, dad.”

They look at each other for a moment.

“Don’t thank me yet. Wait till you see it. It’s a piece of junk.”

They both laugh hard through the tears even though it’s not that funny.

***

Hawkeye tries not to think about Tokyo. B.J. had gotten drunk. B.J. had said some things that—if you squinted at them in just the right light—could be read as romantic. Ok, B.J. had also said some other things that would definitely be read as romantic if you looked at them _in any light_. But B.J. had been drunk, B.J. had felt bad for him. And so he’d said some affectionate, hyperbolic things that messed with Hawkeye’s head, because B.J. had no idea where Hawkeye’s head was at.

This is why Hawkeye is not going to think about it. Being in love with a happily married guy who lives across the continent is ridiculous enough. He can’t exactly afford to layer delusion on top of that, especially not with his mental health history.

***

He tries to write B.J. back:

_Dearest B.J._

_Tell me, really, do you miss me? I don’t miss you. I forget to miss you. Remember how those poor kids whose arms and legs we amputated didn’t believe it when we told them? “But I feel my leg doc, what are you talking about?” they’d say. I finally understand how little I understand what that feels like._

_Turns out, I’m an idiot. But you knew that already. I wake up, my brain doesn’t get the memo that you’re not here. I call up the stairs to ask if you want to play chess. You’re not there. I’m reading something funny, I turn around to read it out loud to you. You’re not there. Dad makes something good for dinner, I take a whole forkful and turn to you to say, “God. Try this Beej.” You get the drift._

_It’s funny. You’re the one who doesn’t like to say goodbye, but apparently I’m the one who can’t let it sink in, no matter how hard I try. I’m walking around half a person. And I forget it. Then I remember the other half of me is in Mill Valley, California, or maybe I left it further back somewhere in Korea. Is this how you felt in Korea without Peg? How did you do it? Can you teach me?_

_That kills me, you know. Finally realizing how you missed her. I’m not jealous that she has you now. You’re hers. She’s yours. It’s the way it should be. You deserve your happily ever after. But there are memories I was hoarding away because, in them, I made you laugh so hard you almost looked happy to be there, or you smiled at me with that, that, that. That look that killed me...But if you felt even half of what I feel now, everything and everyone else was just something to pass the time between when you last thought about Peg and when you got to think about her again. I have to admit, I’m jealous that I never had you at all. That’s ok. Being the best distraction you had in a place like that is something I can be proud of._

_Anyway, Beej. I don’t miss you. What I feel is so far beyond “missing” you that I don’t even have a name for it. I need you. I’m sick with it. I want you, I want you, I love you. I love_

Hawkeye stops writing. He rips the page out of his notepad and tears it into bits so small it looks like he’s throwing confetti in the waste basket.

***

He fantasizes about moving to California. Maybe Berkeley. Or San Francisco. Somewhere close enough to Mill Valley that it’s normal for him to see B.J. every week but not so close that B.J. thinks he’s a stalker.

He would love all three of them, the three Hunnicutts. And maybe, if he was very very funny, Erin would call him Uncle Hawk. And they would invite him over for Sunday dinners and for Christmas. And he would spend his life making B.J laugh until they were both wrinkly old men. 

How different is that, at the end of the day, from what he really wants? (Enough, it turns out, that this particular fantasy always brings on a fresh bout of depression).

***

Five months before the war ends, Hawkeye and B.J. go to Tokyo together on a three-day pass. Years and years later, they will argue over whether this is the pivotal event that results in B.J. showing up at Hawkeye’s doorstep in Maine one cold night in November, or whether that was a foregone conclusion from the moment they held hands on their jeep ride to the 4077 that first day, or even before that when Hawkeye rubbed B.J.’s back while he was doubled over heaving his guts out at his first taste of war, or even before that when B.J. said “Rudyard Kipling.”

As love stories go, Tokyo gets off to a rocky start (not to mention a rocky middle and end). Hawkeye wastes the majority of their first six hours—six out of eighty precious hours— in one of the biggest snits of their friendship.

When they land at Yokota Air Base a mere hour outside of Tokyo, they’re informed that the army is short three transport buses and so instead of being taken directly to their hotel in Tokyo, they will be waiting for a bus that will first go to Sagamihara to drop off an American general at his vacation home, then to Yokohama to drop off a Japanese general’s son, then to Kawasaki to drop off an important package for a French commander’s mistress and then, finally, it would take American soldiers to Tokyo.

“It’s a wonder we’re getting to Tokyo at all. Why not just drop us off in Saitama to serve as French maids to an American commander’s mistress’s cousin?” Hawkeye grumbles as they wait for the bus.

The small crew of soldiers waiting with them laugh in appreciation.

“Don’t let them hear you, or there goes whatever’s left of our R&R,” B.J. chides, sotto voce.

“You’re right. If they find out we can make martinis and sing on top of doing laundry, we’re toast,” Hawkeye deadpans.

“Too right,” B.J. agrees. “Leggy brunette like you? I’m surprised they haven’t tried to seduce you away with promises of glamor and adventure already.”

“It’s not the work I’d mind, mind you,” Hawkeye says thoughtfully.

“No, me neither,” B.J. agrees emphatically. “Nothing wrong with an honest day’s work. It’s the uniforms, the innuendo of it all.”

“Right,” Hawkeye says, almost breaking into a smile now at how B.J. always knows where he’s going with a bit.

“Demeaning, frankly,” B.J. tuts, not breaking at all.

“And the leering! I mean, you know these brass types. Only one thing in mind when they see a pair of long legs in a short skirt,” Hawkeye adds, swooning in distress at the thought.

They both notice the motley crew of servicemen tuning in to their little bit with interest. B.J. affects the over-earnest macho of a romantic lead and Hawkeye starts to bat his eyelashes coquettishly. They kid around back and forth until the bit turns into an adlibbed screwball comedy wherein B.J. is heir to a New York newspaper fortune undercover as a maid to write an exposé about their awful mistreatment and Hawkeye is a European princess undercover as a maid to escape an arranged marriage to the horrible prince picked out by his father.

“You tricked me, you fiend! You led me to believe you were my friend but you were just a screwball comedy lead this whole time,” Hawkeye cries dramatically during the reveal scene. “But then I suppose it cancels out because I tricked you too.”

“I guess you could say...we both got _maid_ ,” B.J. says, lips twitching.

Their little audience laughs but Hawkeye glares at him in warning. B.J., out of character, holds his hands up in surrender and apology.

“Well, I know how you can make it up to me,” Hawkeye says.

“Marry you before your European prince finds you?” B.J. asks and holds his elbow out for Hawkeye.

“You read my mind,” Hawkeye croons, hanging off of the outstretched elbow and batting his lashes up at B.J.

“And they lived happily ever after,” B.J. announces.

They slip out of character and bow deeply to a brief but enthusiastic round of applause, and one wolf whistle which Hawkeye rewards with a wink and a brief curtsy.

“Thank you, thank you,” B.J. says, waving an imaginary cap as he bows deeply.

“You can find us every Thursday night in Uijeongbu, Korea, acting out variations on familiar scenes in a desperate attempt to avoid going absolutely insane,” Hawkeye adds.

A few minutes later, a tired looking clerk brings them all some peanuts and free tourist guides to Tokyo (“The army’s way of saying thanks for your patience, fellas,” he says) and it’s only when everyone has settled down to nap, or eat, or read that the bus pulls up, and a hoard of soldiers returning from R&R come pouring out, smelling like sewer rats dipped in whiskey.

“Now, now. Line up over there. We have to unload all the bags from this bus and the MPs have to do a security check before we can let you fellas on it,” the clerk announces.

They’re all busy grumbling and gathering their things to go stand in line when a voice calls out:

“B.J.? B.J. Hunnicutt?”

Hawkeye and B.J. turn towards the voice in perfect sync. It belongs to a small dark-haired man with sharp-ish features and a handsome smile.

“Kurt?” B.J. calls back.

The two men shake hands and then hug.

“Hawk, this is Doctor Kurt Diamond. The only funny person I met in all of basic training,” B.J. says.

“Hawkeye Pierce.”

“Pleasure,” Kurt says, shaking his hand. “Say, is he still a prankster?”

“I woke up with my shorts nailed to my bed this very morning,” Hawkeye reassures Kurt solemnly. Kurt laughs wholeheartedly and slings an arm around B.J.’s shoulder to squeeze it in an affectionate way that Hawkeye doesn’t like at all.

“Boy, it was really something. Me, a German Jew from New York, learning to dodge bullets...”

“In Texas,” B.J. and Kurt finish in unison.

This seems to be some sort of inside joke because Kurt and B.J. collapse into each other giggling.

“The bi-coastal alliance,” B.J. says when he can finally draw breath again, which sends them into an entirely fresh fit of laughter.

Hawkeye drifts just a few feet away from them under the pretense of keeping watch over their duffle bags, which they’d left unattended. It’s just far enough to let them catch up without feeling like they have to include Hawkeye (or indeed for Hawkeye to feel awkward that they don’t try to include him at all) but not so far that he can’t eavesdrop.

After some pleasantries back and forth, and chatting about where they and everyone they know is stationed, B.J. asks: “Are you headed to Tokyo on our bus then?”

The question gives Hawkeye a little pang of disappointment. Where before he’d seen stretched out before him three uninterrupted days of playing house with B.J. now he only sees three days of playing second fiddle to this guy, who seems to have a treasure trove of old jokes that send B.J. into fits of laughter.

“No, I’m on duty here until later. They’re flying in a batch of kids from Korea to Tokyo General. All stable, but we’re on stand-by in case,” Kurt explains. “But I’m in the city later. Free for dinner?”

Hawkeye hadn’t even dared hope for anything in the way of “dinner alone with B.J. at a nice restaurant” but somehow it still feels like that’s what’s being taken away from him.

But then B.J. grimaces in disappointment. “Ugh, no we can’t.”

Hawkeye catches B.J’s eye in surprise. _Why can’t we?_

B.J. holds his look with a little glint of mischief in his eyes that says, _Go along with it._

“We have to schmooze with generals,” B.J. explains.

“We basically have to beg, entertain, and swill drinks in exchange for a new X-Ray machine,” Hawkeye chimes in, without missing a beat. “It’s just a glorified work trip for us, unfortunately.”

“When do you head back? What about tomorrow or Thursday?” Kurt suggests, looking hopeful.

“I wish. Today and tomorrow is all meetings with the brass. Then Thursday we meet with the supply people, if all goes well, and then we’re going back to Korea that afternoon, I’m afraid,” B.J. says.

It’s all Hawkeye can do to keep his mouth from hanging open at how quickly and easily B.J. is lying. They don’t leave for Korea until Friday!

“That’s really too bad,” Kurt says, looking a bit wistful. He pats B.J.’s arm with that same affectionate air that moments ago had made Hawkeye want to punch him. It now makes him feel sad and protective. Hawkeye would gladly invite Kurt to a thousand dinners.

“It is,” B.J. agrees, looking genuinely sorry. “Well, now that I know you’re stationed here, I’ll write you. And we’ll drop in on you next time we’re in Tokyo, that’s for sure. You’ll have to show us around.”

“Oh. You betcha,” Kurt says, brightening up and winking.

The MPs, done with their inspection for stowaways or contraband or whatever else it is MPs care about, hop off the bus and the clerk comes forward to announce: “The bus is clear for boarding. Please do so in an orderly—“

Everyone rushes past without letting him finish.

Kurt and B.J. continue saying their goodbyes. Hawkeye grabs both their bags and goes to grab them seats without saying a word.

He finds a good, secluded row near the back, and with their duffels stowed in the rack above, he slumps down into the window seat and rests his head against the glass, watching B.J.’s blurred figure through the dusty surface as he wraps up the conversation with Kurt, gives a final wave goodbye, looks around, realizes the absence of both Hawkeye and bags, and runs to hop on the bus. He feels more than he sees B.J. take the seat next to him a moment later.

“A quick ‘I’m going and I’m taking your stuff’ would have been nice,” B.J. teases cheerfully.

“Knew you’d put two and two together,” Hawkeye says flatly, his forehead still pressed against the window.

There’s a pause.

“Oh, I forgot you had a shift last night. You must be dead on your feet,” B.J. says kindly.

“I’m fine.”

Another pause.

“Well, there’s a shoulder here with your name on it, if you need a good nap. It’s not much, but I’ve heard it’s softer than cold hard glass, as far as pillows go.”

“I said I’m fine.”

There’s another pause.

“Ok. Well. I’ll just keep that shoulder nice and warm for you if you change your mind,” B.J. says. Hawkeye hears him flipping through the free Tokyo guidebook the army had handed out.

Finally loaded and boarded, the bus sets off. B.J. flips through the book and occasionally throws out interesting trivia about a temple or a restaurant he thinks they should go to. Hawkeye grunts disagreeably in acknowledgement.

It’s somewhere after they drop off the American general in Sagamihara but before they drop off the Japanese general’s son in Yokohama that things come to a head.

“Look, Hawk, Hawk,” B.J. says, elbowing him eagerly and shoving the guidebook in his face. “The cherry blossoms are probably in bloom now. What a lucky coincidence!”

“I see. That’s very nice,” Hawkeye says venomously. He crosses his arms, and turns away.

“What’s gotten into you? You’ve been mad at me since the Air Base.”

“Oh. He noticed,” Hawkeye throws back, turning his nose up.

Usually, when Hawkeye picks a fight, B.J. gives back just as good as he gets, but, this time, when Hawkeye sneaks a look out of the corner of his eye, B.J. is looking at him softly, without any fight in him.

“What’s wrong?” B.J. asks.

“The fact that you even have to ask that is half the problem,” he says primly.

B.J. lets the silence stretch between them. Hawkeye knows he’s doing it to agitate him into saying more, but that doesn’t keep it from working.

“That friend of yours,” Hawkeye supplies by way of explanation. And it’s more explanation than B.J. deserves, in his opinion.

“Kurt?” B.J. asks, “What about him?”

“He asked if we wanted to have dinner, and you gave him the slip,” Hawkeye accuses, turning to face him.

“Yeah, so?” B.J. asks, bewildered. “Did you _want_ him to tag along for the rest of R&R? Because you know if we’d said yes, dinner would turn into just that.”

Hawkeye had not wanted this Kurt character to tag along, and he is not about to give B.J. the satisfaction of admitting that when Kurt had asked about dinner, Hawkeye’s initial worry thad been exactly that. But that was all water under the bridge now. B.J. had committed crimes far greater than inviting a stranger to crash their holiday.

“You said he was your best buddy back when you did basic in Houston,” Hawkeye points out.

“I guess. Yeah. _So_?” B.J. insists, baffled.

Hawkeye merely sniffs in response and turns back towards the window with a shrug.

“Hawk. I’ve been looking forward to this trip with you for a month. It’s the only good thing that’s happening to me for the foreseeable future. Are you really gonna punish me for something I don’t even know I did by making me spend it alone? Can’t we just make up now instead of in a week?” B.J. pleads. “Just tell me what I did, and I’ll fix it.”

Hawkeye doesn’t know if B.J. is doing it on purpose, but the thought of ruining something B.J.’s been looking forward to does make him feel guilty enough to briefly dim his anger, which makes him even more upset, because Hawkeye can’t even throw a nice cathartic tantrum without his love for B.J. getting in the way.

“You gave him the old ‘we have to meet with General Bunbury’ without batting an eye. Don’t you think that makes you a cold-hearted, disloyal, ungrateful—a—a mean—jerk-face?” Hawkeye says. He knows he’s giving himself away but he can’t help it.

Fortunately B.J.’s stupidity on the subject of Hawkeye’s obsession with him seems to be boundless.

“A jerk-face,” B.J. repeats dryly, sounding highly amused. “Alright. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should learn the _Importance of being Earnest_. If it means so much to you, we’ll ring him up as soon as we get to the hotel and invite him to dinner, okay?”

“No. Not okay! Now you’re just doing it because I told you to. It doesn’t count.”

“What do you want me to say, Hawk? I knew this guy for five weeks two years ago.”

And this, it turns out, is what brings Hawkeye to the brink of tears, so he turns away fully towards the window before saying: “But didn’t those five weeks mean anything to you? You got each other through something. And maybe to you it was just a couple of laughs to pass the time, but maybe for him, your friendship was something that, that was important, you know? I mean. It’s not _nothing_. Making each other laugh in a place where there isn’t much to laugh about—that can be—it can mean something, to some people. That’s all.”

In the silence, Hawkeye can practically hear the pieces falling into place for B.J. “Oh, Hawk.”

And then it all comes rushing out and Hawkeye can’t shut up. “Two or three years after this is over, I’m going to run into you somewhere in the States and you’ll be with Peg, or maybe with a friend from work, and I’ll ask you out for a drink, and it’ll be _me_ you tell a small, polite lie to about what you’re doing later. Yeah, yeah, I know. I hear it, ok? I hear how childish I sound. Like we’re on the playground and I’m yelling that you _pinky swore_ to pick me first for your dodgeball team and you didn’t. But I can’t stand it, I can’t stand seeing the evidence firsthand that in a few years this won’t mean enough to you to go to one lousy dinner, because, I know, I know that—it’ll still mean a lot to me.”

When he sneaks a look, B.J. is staring at him blankly like he’s speaking a foreign language.

Hawkeye feels his face go hot with embarrassment. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Hawkeye,” B.J. says, sounding floored.

B.J. sounds like he’s about to apologize, or reassure. Hawkeye would rather the ground swallow him whole. He wipes his eyes with his sleeves and laughs, waving B.J.’s concern away. “Wow. Who cast me in a high school Tennessee Williams production, right? Sorry. I’m, I’m just tired. You know how I get melodramatic when I’m tired.”

B.J. is still staring at him like he’s grown Frank’s head on his shoulder.

“Hawk, you’re my _best_ friend,” B.J. says as though that rebuts everything Hawkeye has just said.

“This guy was your best friend too,” he says miserably.

“No, Hawk. He wasn’t. We weren’t—we were just friends because we were stuck at basic and we both needed someone else to talk to,” B.J. explains.

Hawkeye laughs darkly and gives B.J. a pointed look, waving a hand around as though to say, _And what do you think this is?_

“You and I are _not_ just friends because we’re stuck in Korea,” B.J. says, “I wish I could show you how I’d like you right away if I’d met you anywhere else. Some guys are lucky enough to meet the important people in their lives in nice, _pleasant_ circumstances, but we’re just not that kind of lucky. We’re just the ‘get drafted to Korea, but at least you get assigned to the same tent as your best friend’ amount of lucky.”

“Pffft,” Hawkeye says, rolling his eyes. But the anger is threatening to drain right out of him.

They share a small smile. Something shifts in the air. B.J. suddenly looks serious.

“Hawk, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Ever. There’s no one in the world I like as well as I like you.”

 _What about Peg?_ Hawkeye almost asks petulantly. But he knows what B.J. means. It’s not about love or admiration (though for Hawkeye it’s about that too). There’s something special about the way he and B.J. like each other. They like each other _well._ They are good at liking each other. When they are together, they are well-liked. And it feels well to be as well-liked as this.

Hawkeye thaws.

“Oh, alright. You know I can’t stay mad at you when you hit me with your—your—your—“

“Soulful eyes? Winning smile? Moving declarations of affection and friendship?” B.J. offers with a grin.

“No, your cheesy mustache. It’s so silly that it’s hard to remember why I’m mad when I look at it.”

They laugh, and settle into an easy silence. Hawkeye goes back to staring out the window but, imperceptible to anyone but them, the invisible barrier disappears. Hawkeye lets his weight rest against B.J.’s side.

B.J. reads him interesting snippets and attractions from the guidebook, and Hawkeye hums in appreciation or throws back a funny one-liner.

It’s much later, when it’s almost dusk and they’ve dropped off the general, the general’s son, and the commander’s mistress’s package, and they’re finally pulling into Tokyo, that Hawkeye apologizes, apropos of nothing:

“Look, you didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m sorry I took it out on you, Beej. It’s just—there’s a proven record—listen, I’m just not the kind of person anyone wants to know for long.”

“Yes, you are,” B.J. snaps, turning a page loudly to punctuate his point. His tone is so forceful, almost angry, that Hawkeye startles and turns to him with a questioning look. He keeps looking until B.J. meets his eyes.

“Yes, you are,” B.J. repeats, kindly this time, but still with an edge of steel to it. He goes back to reading, holding the book up to catch the last bit of daylight from the window.

***

Hawkeye gets B.J.’s postcard on a sweltering day in August, about three weeks after he gets back from Korea. A few days later, he leaves the house for the first time, and drives the Studebaker his dad bought him to the grocery store. He spends twenty minutes looking at fresh fruit. He picks out one of everything.

In the cereals aisle, he makes a toddler laugh by making funny faces while an older sibling and the mom argue about Rice Krispies versus Corn Flakes. He doesn’t remember which cereal he likes. They end up picking Rice Krispies so Hawkeye does the same.

***

At home, he makes himself a bowl of cereal (with real milk!) with the same pomp and circumstance as if it were a five star meal. He sings “Puttin’ on the Ritz” the whole time he unpacks the groceries and puts out a nice place setting for himself.

It takes two whole spoonfuls for him to remember he doesn’t like Rice Krispies. He throws the whole thing in the trash.

He goes to his room and reads B.J.’s postcard again. This time he gets hung up on the words “Miss ya already.” He reads those words over and over until he falls asleep.

***

Hawkeye had been worried that Crabapple Cove would be completely unrecognizable. But he finds it’s pretty much exactly the same. There’s a Chinese restaurant on Blanchard and Main now. That's a truly wondrous phenomenon given that, in Hawkeye’s experience, most of Crabapple Cove still views bagels and lox as an exotic food choice.

Dad still has his weekly poker nights. Ginny still beats everyone at poker and flirts with dad. Rooster still plays with his wedding ring when he has a bad hand. There are two new guys whose names Hawkeye forgets as soon as he learns them. Michelle is teaching third grade now but she still goes out drinking with Hawkeye on school nights and teases him when he wants to go home at 1 am.

It’s worse that everything is the same, he finds out. Because he’s not, and if things were different, maybe he wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb. He’s not the same carefree ambitious guy who dreamed of being a rising star surgeon in Boston. He’s not the same guy who would stay up all night cramming before a big med school exam and show up running on nothing but coffee and bourbon. He’s not the same guy who would get kicked out of bars with Michelle and her friends when the sun was coming up.

He feels apart from all of them now. He’s tired, and he’s hurt, he’s impatient with everything, and he just wants the company of the only person he wouldn’t need to explain himself to.

***

He takes another stab at responding to B.J.’s postcard:

_My dearest B.J.,_

_You told me once that you think I'm lonely. The truth is I’m so much lonelier now than I ever was before I met you. And that’s why I’m so scared of writing you. The thought that we—you and I—could trade amusing anecdotes back-and-forth about our home towns or meet up one year to go out to dinner? The thought that I could ever be lonely when I talk to you? It makes me feel_

He rips this one up too.

***

He has nightmares when he gets back. They’re different from the nightmares he had in Korea.

He’s operating on wounded soldiers out in a field by himself. Radar is there and wheels them in one by one.

“Radar, Radar,” he calls.

“Yeah, Hawkeye?”

“Can you get me B.J.? Where is that idiot when I need him? Is he sleeping? Go wake him up. I need a hand.”

“I don’t know Hawkeye. I haven’t seen him in a while,” Radar shrugs.

“What do you mean? This isn’t exactly the Taj Mahal. Go run around the camp until you find him. I need him.”

Radar just shrugs and wheels another wounded soldier in. Where are they coming from? They’re in a field. They don’t usually operate in a field, do they? No one’s around. Where the hell is B.J.?

“B.J.? B.J.?? Beej I need you,” he calls out, wiping blood and sweat from his brows.

“He’s not here, Hawk. You just have to keep going by yourself as best as you can,” Radar tells him in an eerily detached tone.

“Charles? Colonel Potter?” He asks, trying to keep his hands steady as he picks shrapnel out of the kid’s leg.

“No one’s here, Hawk,” Radar says, smiling maliciously.

The kid screams in pain. Radar laughs. Hawkeye finds this quite rude but he doesn’t say anything in case he’s just forgetting the rules and it’s perfectly acceptable to laugh when someone screams. B.J. would know. He should ask B.J. but B.J.'s nowhere to be found.

“B.J. wouldn’t leave me here,” Hawkeye says. “B.J. wouldn’t make me do this by myself. If I’m calling and he’s not coming, that means he can’t...he can’t come...because he’s...”

The realization, in his nightmare, that B.J. must be dead shakes him awake. He sobs first in terror and then in sheer relief. He’s home. B.J. is alive.

***

He gets a job in the ER at St. Andrew’s Hospital in Bristol, Maine.

Dad insists at first that Hawkeye come work for him.

“Think about it, Hawkeye. Our names up in lights over the marquee! Pierce and Pierce!”

“Well, you know it’s always been my dream to see my name in lights,” Hawkeye says. “But I think my solo bit act needs a lot of work. I don’t know how to do anything unless the roof’s almost caving in from shelling, dad. I need to remember what civilian doctors are like.”

In the end, they both agree on Hawkeye doing two shifts a week at the ER and two afternoons taking over dad’s office hours. He likes both. He likes that the ER is fast-paced by civilian standards and he gets to save lives, treat real injuries. Most of all he likes how rarely they lose patients and how everyone acts like it’s a big deal when they do. In dad’s office, he likes joking around with kids until they forget about their runny noses.

One day he’s driving back from dad’s office when, quite without his permission, his mind drifts to Tokyo, to B.J. drunkenly playing with his fingers, and smiling at him sweetly, telling him that one day they’ll open their own clinic, that they’ll do so much good together, that they’ll—

He pulls over to the shoulder, turns the car off, and screams his heart out.


	2. Chapter 2

When he does let himself think (fantasize) about B.J., it’s not about the night in Tokyo.

He doesn’t even really think about the time he lost his right glove in the middle of December and B.J. took his freezing hand right between his giant gloved ones and rubbed it warm and blew hot air on it and they both laughed for no reason and B.J. held his hand for the next week whenever they went outside until Hawkeye’s new gloves came in the mail and Margaret joked they were like high school sweethearts and B.J. blew a raspberry at her and said Margaret was just jealous because B.J. got the _cute, funny chief surgeon_ and she got Frank.

No. He doesn’t think about that. The stuff he thinks about isn’t romantic at all.

He thinks about the time he was sitting on the bench outside of the O.R. after his second twenty-hour shift in a row. Sitting with his head in his hands. Too tired to move, too tired to even get himself to bed, too cold to even try to get warm, and suddenly someone was standing above him, and gentle hands were taking his and placing a warm mug between them.

“Beej,” he’d said when he meant _thank you._

In reply, B.J. had carded a few fingers through his hair and then pressed his index and forefinger against Hawkeye’s temple, for just a moment. Hawkeye thinks about it a lot. About how he and B.J. were somewhere beyond words. He thinks about how he understood the gesture perfectly. _I’m here. You’re welcome. I know, it stinks here. I know you’re too tired to move. I’ll be here to help you up when you’re ready._ He understood all of that in one touch. And isn’t that just the trouble.

***

Hawkeye gets back in July, he gets B.J.’s postcard on a sweltering day in August, and it’s a perfect-New-England-autumn day in September when he gets home from work—to the new place he’s renting just a ten-minute drive from his dad’s place—to find his dad waiting for him in the driveway with a second postcard from B.J.

“Dad? What’s wrong? Did something happen? Are you okay? Is it Rooster? Ginny?”

Dad smiles, and waves away his concern.

“Nah, Hawk. I just got another postcard from that nice young fella of yours. Why didn’t you write him back yet?” dad says as Hawkeye fumbles for his keys.

“You came here just to give me...” Hawk complains and then realizes his dad must be talking about B.J. “Don’t call him that.”

“Well, what do _you_ call it when a nice young fella writes you a nice note, and you don’t write him back, and he writes you another nice note sounding like a heartbroken teenager?”

“You read my letter _again_?” Hawkeye chides, grabbing the postcard out of his dad’s hand as they walk inside. It takes every ounce of self-control he has not to sit down and read it right there on the welcome mat.

“I didn’t realize it was yours,” his dad says mischievously.

“It has my name on it, you old fraud, you no good trickster,” Hawkeye says, laughing and pretending like his heart isn’t hammering against his rib cage. “Now that you’re here, how about a beer and that game of chess we haven’t finished?”

“You’re on. Get ready to lose,” his dad says, going to bring out the board while Hawkeye heads for the kitchen.

He takes two beers out of the fridge, puts them on the counter and finally dares to read B.J.’s postcard.

_Hawk! It’s me. Remember me? The guy you spent every waking moment of your life with for over two years?_

_Didn’t you get my postcard? Come on now. Don’t leave a guy hanging, or I’ll think all that time you were whispering sweet nothings to me in the Swamp you were secretly just waiting to get rid of me._

_Write me back, stupid. Please?_

_I miss you, a lot,_

_B.J._

He doesn’t realize how long he’s been standing, his hands braced against the counter, bracketing the postcard, until he hears his dad behind him.

“Told you,” dad says, without explaining what he means.

“Please don’t.”

“Hawk, what did I tell you when you had that big fight with your high school friend? God, you two were inseparable but I can’t remember his name now.”

“Billy,” Hawkeye supplies helpfully.

“Right. You shut yourself in your room and you wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Do you remember what I told you?”

“Dad,” Hawkeye says, mortified. “Please. God. Not this again.”

“I said I’m proud of you no matter what, but I’m especially proud of you for being brave enough to love who you love, okay?”

“Oh my god, I’m having war flashbacks,” Hawkeye sighs. “If I open up to you about my big crush on Cary Grant, will that make you feel like we’ve emotionally bonded? Will that stop this?”

His dad ignores him.

“So you like B.J. So what? Tell him.”

For a moment, Hawkeye doesn’t say anything.

“His affectations do not that way tend,” he finally says in an exaggerated British accent, one eyebrow arched for effect.

His dad rolls his eyes. “Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you tell him?”

Hawk laughs. “What’s the best thing that can happen? Best case scenario he says ‘well, gee Hawk, I never thought about it but I guess we did flirt a lot and maybe in another life I would’ve had a little crush on you too.’ And then he feels like he’s been unfaithful to Peg—the woman he loves and talks about constantly, by the way—for something that never even happened. I think if I’m a decent human being I don’t go ruining the happiness of the only person I...” he trails off, turns the postcard over so it’s sea-lion-side up and slaps it against the counter with the flat of his hand like it’s a bug he’s trying to squish.

“You’re a moron, Hawkeye. You’re kind of smart, which makes you even more of a moron,” his dad says.

Hawkeye says nothing, just glaring at him.

“Just write the poor boy back, at least,” dad says.

They stand glaring at each other for a long time. Hawkeye shoves a beer in his dad’s hand.

“Fine. Ready to lay your king down, old man?” Hawkeye teases.

His dad rolls his eyes but follows him back into the living room.

***

When he goes to sleep, he’s back in the field. Margaret is wrapping a bandage tightly around his left arm. In his right hand, he’s holding a scalpel, cutting into a bloody torso.

“What happened to my arm?” he asks Margaret.

“Took some shrapnel. Got it out, but you’ll have to operate with one arm for now,” Margaret says calmly.

“Where’s Beej?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s Charles?”

“Hawkeye...” Margaret looks at him as if he’s lost his mind and then looks down pointedly at the man Hawkeye is operating on.

Hawkeye looks down and it’s Charles bleeding out under his hand.

“No, no. Charles,” he cries, redoubling his efforts to get all the shrapnel out of Charles’s leg. Or was it his torso? Definitely one of the two. He keeps digging.

“It’s okay, Pierce,” Charles says bravely. “As much as it was pains me to pay you a compliment, and believe me it does, you’re doing quite well under the circumstances. Keep going, now. I’m in no pain.”

“In no pain? You have a mild local anesthetic and I’m digging into your goddamn flesh with one hand,” Hawkeye cries out.

“It’s ok Hawk. You can’t save everyone,” Radar says, stifling a groan as Hawkeye extracts another fragment from his thigh.

Wait, Radar? Where was Charles? He must have imagined Charles. He must be delirious from the pain in his arm. It occurs to him that he shouldn’t be performing surgery if he’s delirious.

When he looks up from the wound again it’s Colonel Potter. And then it’s Klinger. And then it’s Henry Blake. Each of them screaming in pain and then telling him it’s okay, it’s not his fault.

And then it’s Trapper.

“Hey, come here often?” Trapper says, trying for a grin that looks more like a grimace.

“No, no. Not you. You got out safe. You’re not here. Please,” he begs, trying to keep his hands from shaking as he digs out another spec of bloody metal from thigh muscle.

Trapper’s hands come to rest on top of his.

“It’s okay, Hawk. You’re gonna save me. I trust you. I’m here,” Trapper says. But it’s B.J.’s voice and when he looks up from the wound it’s B.J. staring down at him. And that’s when he starts crying in earnest.

“No, no, no. Not B.J. Please not B.J. Take someone else. He has to go back. Listen. He has to go back to Peg and Erin.”

He has no clue who he’s talking to, but he knows there’s some higher power here. He’s never believed in one, but there has to be someone, someone who can intervene when things were about to go so terribly terribly off course.

But unlike the people before him, B.J. stubbornly refuses to morph into anyone else. Instead, he groans and then takes Hawkeye’s hand in his own. The hemostat slips from Hawkeye’s fingers. B.J. laces their fingers together.

“Hawk. It’s okay. You’re doing great. It’s not your fault. Just listen.”

“No, no, no. Please don’t do this,” Hawkeye sobs. “I’ll do anything. I’ll be good for the rest of my life. I’ll never ask for anything, _anything_ , ever again. Nothing. Just this, just this one—“

“Shut up, Hawk. It’s ok, it’s not your fault. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I want to tell you, even if it’s too late...I just need to tell you...I...”

An explosion drowns B.J. out.

“No,” Hawkeye screams.

Hawkeye wakes up with a jolt. There’s a storm outside. Thunder rattles the window-frame like it’s artillery shell falling around Battalion Aid. He lays awake the rest of the night, thinking about the nightmare and how, in it, he would have given anything, even his own life, to have B.J. back home with Peg.

***

Hawkeye thinks about what to write for a long time. He thinks about his nightmare. He thinks of B.J. who has been miserable for two years and is finally living his happily ever after. That does make him smile. What sort of monster is he if he can’t be happy for B.J.?

He tries to go for a balance between “everything is fine between us” and “there’s really no need for you to feel obliged to keep in touch with me.”

_Dear B.J.,_

_Sorry I haven’t written. Thank you for the postcards. I loved the little sea lions. We don’t have any funny animals in Maine (do squirrels count?) so I’m sending you a picture of New England in autumn._

_Well, idiot, I could have told you there was never any chance of Erin being anything less than a beautiful genius. Give her a big hug from me._

_Listen, I don’t think I’m up for another long plane ride any time soon. But I’m sure one of us will end up on the opposite coast one day. Just like you said, right?_

_You asked me how Maine is. It’s fine. To tell you the truth, I’m happy I’m not in Korea but I’m not used to being back yet, you know? I’m a little out of place. But I like my job at the hospital a lot. (Are you working yet? Civilian surgery feels like riding a bicycle down a hill.) I like going out for long walks where there are trees and water and no death at all. I’ll find my footing soon._

_Hey, if you’ll allow your old pal a moment to be sentimental—when I think about you in Mill Valley, living your happily ever after with Peg and Erin, that makes me smile. No one in the world deserves happiness more than you, Beej. Promise to take care of yourself, okay? And to be disgustingly happy. I’d really like it if you were disgustingly happy._

_My love to all three of you._

_Your friend forever,_

_Hawkeye_

***

A week after he sends B.J. the letter, his dad calls him.

“B.J. called me,” his dad tells him on the phone.

“What?? B.J.? B.J. Hunnicutt called you? Is he okay? Did something happen?” he cries, feeling the bile in the back of his throat. The nightmares. They don’t mean anything, but what if they do? Is B.J. hurt? Was Erin or Peg?

“Calm down, Ben. Everything is fine. He said he just got your letter and wanted to talk. I told him you’d just moved into your own place and hadn’t gotten your phone set up yet. I wasn’t sure if you were up for a call yet.”

Hawkeye isn’t sure either.

“Thanks, dad.”

***

The next day Hawkeye gets a telegram from B.J.

_Hawk. Got your letter. I didn’t like it and I didn’t understand it. You don’t sound ok. Want to talk? Did I do something? Tried calling your dad’s place. Please call me. Miss you and hope to see you soon. B.J._

Hawkeye slips the telegram into his pocket and goes for a long walk. He sits by the lake and watches the sunset, and reminds himself again and again that B.J. is happily married.

He balls up the telegram, tosses it into the lake, and stomps away. He regrets it immediately, spins on his heels, and walks back to try to retrieve it. He dangles off the dock for it. He’d let B.J. off the hook with a nice cheery letter and B.J. had kept pushing. It’s the only concrete bit of evidence he has that B.J. means it, B.J. can tell he’s not fine, B.J. really misses him, B.J. really wants to talk to him.

He nearly falls into the water trying to grab it before giving up. He sits down on the dock and watches the soggy bit of paper bob in the water for a long time. He reminds himself again and again that it doesn’t mean anything that B.J. is attuned to his mood from 3,000 miles away. B.J.’s married. B.J.’s happily married. And Hawkeye shouldn’t—Hawkeye doesn’t want B.J. and Peg to be anything less than blissfully happy together.

***

He goes by the lake every day that week and looks out at the farther shore. It reminds him of a poem B.J. had read him long ago about Leander swimming across the Hellespont to embrace Hero in her lonely tower every night and how he drowned one night in the storm when Hero’s guiding light had burned out. He can’t fancy himself Hero in this story for more than the briefest second without laughing. It was Peg’s light that had kept B.J. going through the hell of war. So, with B.J. as Leander and Peg as Hero, and the ending rewritten so happily, what does that make Hawkeye? Some buddy of Leander’s that doesn’t even get an honorable mention in the story.

***

It takes him another week to work up the courage to call.

“Hello?” B.J. says when Hawkeye finally does.

“Oh crap. It’s you. I meant to call the Chinese takeout place down the street,” Hawkeye jokes.

“Hawk, it’s you,” B.J. says, his joy evident in his voice.

“It’s me,” Hawkeye says, with what he knows is a dopey smile on his face.

“God. I’ve missed your voice,” B.J. says with so much emotion that Hawkeye is briefly speechless.

“Yeah, uh, same here,” he says, when he finally remembers how to talk.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” B.J. sings. There’s no malice in it, only joy.

“Well, Hunnicutt. You live in a big city, I live in a little cove. I’m a hero to these people. When I got back, months of feasts, parades, and celebrations were organized in my honor. They keep calling me a war hero. I tell’em it was just a tiny police action. I tell’em I got hauled off to the court martial about once a week. But they don’t listen. You wouldn’t believe my social calendar. I had to kiss so many crying babies my lips are chapped and bleeding.”

This earns him a full belly laugh from B.J. “God, I’ve missed your voice,” B.J. says again, almost to himself. “Don’t worry. I’m visiting soon. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m a doctor. I’ll treat your war injury when I get there.”

“You’re coming here? To Crabapple Cove, Maine?”

“Is that a problem?”

“No, it’s just...” Hawkeye stops himself before he can say, _It’s just I might die when you leave again._

“It’s just what?” B.J. snaps. For the first time since he picked up the phone, B.J. sounds on edge and annoyed.

 _Great, now I’ve done it,_ Hawkeye thinks.

“You’re always welcome here, Beej. You know I would have packed you in my suitcase from Korea if I could have. It’s just generous of Peg to let you go traipsing around the country so soon, it’s all.”

“Oh. That,” B.J. says, sounding mollified but only slightly. “Well. Listen. There are some things I wanted to talk to you about in person. But now...I don’t know. Hawk. Truth is, I feel a little wrong-footed. You sound. You sound...so..so...”

“Dashing? Handsome? Blue-eyed?” Hawk interjects in his best It-Girl voice. A little levity was usually the ticket to distracting B.J. from talking about Serious Topics.

“You stole the words right out of my mouth,” B.J. says, playing right into it.

“Knew it.”

“But, also. Far away. Right now and in your letter. You sound like you’re trying to politely tell me to buzz, and maybe I’m not taking the hint,” B.J. says. “It’s ok if you don’t want me—I don’t know if—I wouldn’t want to impose if your dance card is already full. What with your new celebrity life style and all.”

B.J. has a singular talent for saying serious things in a serious way but taking the edge off by sounding like he’s about to burst into laughter at any moment. Hawkeye can just see the expression on his face: earnest but with that little self-deprecating smile on his face.

“Me? Not want you here? You’re even stupider than you look, Hunnicutt,” Hawkeye teases.

“Is that so?” B.J. teases back, sounding elated.

“You spent nearly every waking moment with me for two years and you still can’t tell that I’m up in my own stupid head when I get like this? Not everything is about you, self-centered idiot.”

“Oh, you’ve finally guessed my full name.”

“The B and the J in Self-centered Idiot are silent?”

“Exactly.”

They both laugh.

“Okay, then. I’ll see you and your stupid head soon. Maybe I can distract you from whatever’s going on up there for a bit,” B.J. says.

“Good,” Hawkeye says, his stomach in a knot.

“Hawk?”

“Hmmm?”

“I really...I can’t wait to see you.”

They’re silent for a moment.

“Same here, Beej. I miss you.”

There’s a loud exhale on the other side.

“Okay, okay, good, yeah,” B.J. says in a relieved rush. And then he laughs, sounding giddy.

“Okay,” Hawkeye agrees, feeling stupid. He can’t help but laugh too.

“Okay,” B.J. says again.

“Okay.”

“Well. Okay.”

“Alright, then.”

“Jeez, alright. Okay.”

“Ooookay.”

They laugh harder than Hawkeye has laughed since he got back.

***

“Check,” his dad says, taking his rook.

“I’m scared,” Hawkeye admits.

“Well you should be, I’m two moves away from a checkmate.”

“To see him.”

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t Mr. ‘I’d rather die than talk to my dad about boys.’”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” Hawkeye says. “What if I see him and it turns out the person I got along best with in the whole world, I only got along best with because of the war?”

His dad rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything. Let’s him sit with it.

“Worse. What if we actually do get along just as well as I remember?” Hawkeye says.

“Checkmate.”

“Fuck you, dad.”

***

That trip to Tokyo happens about five months before the armistice. (Hawkeye had gone there once with B.J. about a year earlier and before that he’d gone once solo, which resulted in him missing saying goodbye to Trapper, racing to Kimpo, and landing straight in B.J.’s arms, metaphorically speaking). But the morning after they sleep off the unfortunate bus ride, they notice that there’s something different in the air in the city. The peace negotiations are finally getting somewhere, and everyone seems to know it. All around them, servicemen from all sixteen UN countries are flirting harder, drinking louder, and losing poker money faster than ever before.

“They _say_ ,” a British captain tells them conspiratorially at the hotel bar the morning after their arrival, “they _say_ that POWs are the only thing left on the negotiation table. An Australian CO told me that a Canadian general told him that the boys at Panmunjom finally agreed that the Swiss and the Swedish would take over the demilitarized zone after armistice while they negotiate reunification. And they’re making progress on the repatriation talks. We’re weeks away from the end, they say.”

Hawkeye rolls his eyes. “Well haven’t we heard _that_ lie before?” he says to B.J. with a look meant to convey, _Can you believe this guy?_

But B.J. doesn’t return the look like he expects. “I don’t know, Hawk. Look around. Doesn’t the brass seem a little less brass-y than usual to you? I heard a three-star general whistling ‘Anything Goes’ in line for the breakfast buffet this morning.”

“One gay general does not an armistice make,” Hawkeye reasons.

A Korean captain sitting further down the bar leans over to join in. “It’s really true. I can attest. I heard it directly from my brother and he’s quite high up. Your people are already talking withdrawal strategy.”

A flurry of excited whispers and speculation overtakes the hotel bar. Hawkeye is the only one who remains unmoved by the supposed bit of valuable military intelligence.

“Trust me,” he tells B.J., leaning in close to be heard over the noise, “I’ve heard that bit of gossip, and a dozen more versions of it, spread around since I got here. We’re not getting out of hell that easy.”

“You’re probably right,” B.J. says, looking inexplicably uneasy, “but eventually there will come a time when someone will spread that little bit of gossip and it’ll be true. Who’s to say this isn’t that time?”

As it would later turn out, they are both a little bit right and a little bit wrong. The two sides _had_ made significant progress and an armistice does get signed. But it’s not in a few weeks, it’s in a few months. And between the time they hear about the talks in Tokyo and the day the ceasefire is announced, they treat wounded soldiers from three major battles, some of the bloodiest of the war, and Hawkeye suffers a mental breakdown that lands him in the hospital. Both B.J. and Hawkeye later agree that to say the end of the war was “close” that day in Tokyo would be as ridiculous as saying Senator McCarthy “wasn’t fond” of communism.

As it is, when they hear the news in Tokyo, B.J. takes the possibility to heart. “Hawk, this could be our last R&R together. Or maybe the last R&R either of us get at all. And you know what? Who knows if we’ll ever come back to Tokyo in our lives? It ain’t cheap to fly all the way out here. I mean, we’re always so relieved when we get away from the war, I never thought of it but...it is a nice city isn’t it? The kind of place you’d want to go to even if it wasn’t a stone’s throw from hell on earth.”

Hawkeye sighs. “Beej I’m telling you—“

“Yeah, yeah. I know you’re probably right. ‘ _No peace for the wicked_ ,’ as the saying goes. But humor me, alright? Let’s make a big trip of it. Let’s go to dinner at the Imperial, and sit by the water at the gardens, and everything else we’d do if we were here on a _real_ holiday.”

Hawkeye wants nothing more than to spend the next three days splitting his time exclusively between the hotel bar and the hotel restaurant, but the moment he sees the excited look on B.J.’s face he knows he’ll walk the length of Tokyo if B.J. asks.

He slumps with a resigned sigh, and knocks back the rest of his drink in one go. B.J., knowing he’s won, pats his hand affectionately.

“I knew you’d come around,” B.J. says, clapping his hands together. “You’ll have fun. I promise.”

B.J. hops off his barstool and makes a run towards the lobby. “Getting a map,” he announces over his shoulder.

Hawkeye drains the last few drops of sake B.J. left in his cup. “Not having fun is not exactly what I’m worried about,” he whispers to himself after B.J. is safely out of earshot, and then follows.

***

Despite B.J.’s best laid plans, their picturesque Tokyo holiday gets off to a slow start when they run into a former 4077 nurse in their hotel lobby and she bursts into tears in the middle of saying a quick hello to them. Hawkeye manages to get out of her that she’s there to see her fiancé but that he’s been ordered into a new offensive by a general in Tokyo, who’s really only on the war path because he’s in a spat with his wife. Watching her sobbing her eyes out about how she’s waited every moment of the past six months to see him again, Hawkeye decides right away that they’ll be spending the rest of the day concocting some scheme to give the young lovers the Tokyo reunion they’ve been dreaming of. It takes a few pleading looks and whispers from Hawkeye for B.J. to give up on their itinerary, pocket the map he’s been poring over, and join him in scheming. In the end it takes several fake telegrams, a rigged game of poker, Hawkeye dressing up as a cocktail waitress, B.J. breaking a two-hundred dollar vase, and a midnight phone call to New York to get the general to call off the surprise new offensive and get the fiancé on a plane to Tokyo.

Their second day there, Hawkeye does allow B.J. to drag him all across town. First to a temple where they get omikuji. Hawkeye’s indicates he has neither good nor bad but “medium luck.” B.J.’s tells him he’s unlucky in the present but he might have “future luck.” They both laughingly reassure the apologetic priestess that they already knew they wouldn’t get one of the good fortunes, they were drafted to Korea after all. Then, they eat more raw fish than Hawkeye thought was humanly possible, walk across town to see a gallery, and go to the kabuki theater.

On their last day, B.J. announces they must see the cherry blossoms up close and so they end up on a boat floating through a calm moat surrounded by the trees.

When Hawkeye blinks awake slowly to see B.J.’s face framed by a halo of blinding bright light and cherry blossom branches, he naturally thinks he’s died in Korea and there’s a heaven after all. Then he remembers he’s in Tokyo. He remembers renting a rowboat because the river was “the best way to see the cherry blossoms according to the book, Hawk.” He remembers lying down to look up at the cherry tree branches, and then resting his eyes for just a moment. He must have fallen asleep and rolled onto B.J.’s lap somehow. It startles him, like he’s been caught playing out a fantasy.

“Aaaaah,” he exclaims and bolts to the other side. The boat rocks furiously from side-to-side.

“Oh lie back down, will you? You’re gonna capsize the boat, and just when I was having such a pleasant afternoon,” B.J. says, his nose in a tattered book of poetry they’d bought at a roadside kiosk. They’d had only four choices when it came to English reading materials: a copy of Romeo & Juliet with acts four and five missing, an old radio manual, a children’s book about a family of bears who need to find a place to hibernate, or the weathered book of poetry that B.J. was now buried in. Hawkeye watches B.J. reading. There’s a gentle breeze ruffling his hair and the water is glistening behind him, and Hawkeye wonders, not for the first time, how the universe could be cruel enough to taunt him with such a facsimile of what he truly wants.

“Sorry. Bad dream,” he lies. He’s fallen asleep on B.J. more times than he can count. He’s fallen asleep on B.J.’s back, arm, leg, shoulder, and probably even his lap. But for some reason it’s different here, surrounded by water and trees. It’s different when there are no explosions and no necessity.

“Go back to sleep,” B.J. says distractedly. He looks completely engrossed by the book. Hawkeye blinks at him blearily.

“I’m surprised I fell asleep to begin with. We slept ten hours last night.”

“But you hadn’t slept more than three hours a night for a month before that. You need rest,” B.J. says, still sounding a bit distracted. He pats the spot on his leg where Hawkeye’s head had been resting moments ago.

Hawkeye wants to ask about the book, about what’s got B.J. looking so feverish. But he’s not about to turn down an invitation to B.J.’s lap. So he lies down, and then clears his throat. “How’s the—you like the book?”

B.J.’s fingers start to comb through Hawkeye’s hair.

“Tarry, delight, so seldom met. So sure to perish. Tarry still,” B.J. reads.

“I don’t know it,” Hawkeye confesses. He has butterflies in his stomach.

“No, me neither. This is the kind of poetry that Professor Hargrove didn’t think was serious enough to teach us,” B.J. laughs. “But—and maybe this is because the most poetic thing I’ve read in months is the back of a morphine bottle, maybe it’s the breathtaking scenery—it’s done a bit of a number on me.”

“Hmmm,” Hawkeye agrees. B.J. is stroking his hair and reading him poetry. Hawkeye wonders if maybe he is dead after all.

“On Hero’s heart Leander lies. The signal torch has burned its hour, and sputters as it dies,” B.J. reads on.

And while Hawkeye doesn’t know this one either, it does remind him of a different poem about Hero and Leander that he knows will make B.J. laugh.

“Where's the lamp that Hero lit once to call Leander home?" Hawkeye says.

He feels B.J. shake with laughter. “Rudyard Kipling,” B.J. says dutifully. He says it just the same as the very first day Hawkeye had met him even though everything else is miles different.

They sit in content silence for just a moment.

“Hero burning a light to guide Leander across the shore. Leander swimming across the Hellespont in the storm to see her. It’s...” Hawkeye trails off, realizing there’s no way to complete that thought without showing his hand. They let the silence stretch.

“Go on, tell me. Tell me,” B.J. says with an unexpected note of urgency long after Hawkeye is sure he’ll just let the unformed thought slip away unaddressed. There’s no way Hawkeye is going to say: _Well, Beej. We read the Ovid version of Hero and Leander in high school the week I realized I was in love with Billy and then he pushed me into the water. And I told Trapper a line from this story instead of telling him I loved him. And I love you more than I’ve loved anyone in my life and here you are reading it out loud to me. So it’s a little bit funny. That’s all._

“Nothing. Just. Did I ever tell you about the time we thought Trapper was gonna get discharged because of his ulcer? I made a joke about—I told him I’d keep a light burning for him if he was ever headed this way,” Hawkeye muses, knowing he’s not making much sense but also knowing he can’t say more. “Just funny how some things keep popping back up. That’s all.”

“Oh,” B.J. says flatly. His fingers go still.

Hawkeye kicks himself mentally. The last time they’d talked about Trapper it was because B.J. had brought up how jealous he was. Because Trapper got to go home and B.J. was stuck here. And now Hawkeye’s gone and mentioned both Trapper _and_ going home.

Hawkeye is racking his brain for ways to apologize, to get B.J. back in a good mood, when B.J. says, very gently: “No. No, you hadn’t told me that.“

B.J. goes back to stroking Hawkeye’s hair, and that seems to be the end of that.


	3. Chapter 3

The Last Night in Tokyo, as it comes to be known in the Pierce-Hunnicutt Household years later, is one of Hawkeye and B.J.’s absolute favorite things to argue about after the war.

Hawkeye insists that The Last Night in Tokyo is their real anniversary: February 28th.

B.J. maintains that it would be ridiculous to celebrate their anniversary on any day _other than_ November 5th, the date they saw each other again _after the war._

Erin, visiting for Christmas break during her junior year of college, inadvertently adds fuel to a fire that has long petered out when she interjects off-hand (through a mouthful of French toast) in the middle of the argument, which they’re rehashing more out of habit than anything else at that point, that she never understood why they didn’t consider the day they met in Korea as a compromise. This sets off an entirely new round of debate over whether that day doesn’t count because Hawkeye was still too in love with Trapper or if B.J. was still too in love with the idea of being with Peg. It never gets truly ugly but it gets ugly enough that neither of them notice Erin grabbing the entire tray of French toast and slipping out to eat it in peace on the porch.

Over the years, they gradually arrive at an uneasy truce over the anniversary issue. (They each aggressively dote on the other on what they consider the “correct” date, and they come to an unspoken agreement not to argue about it on either date). But years before all of this, and indeed years before The Last Night in Tokyo earns its capitalized letters in their house, they have their first argument on this topic just a few months after their first kiss, sitting in what used to be B.J. and Peg’s guest bedroom in their Mill Valley house.

“In fact, it’s not just dead wrong to pick anything but November 5 as our anniversary. I’d go so far as to say that it—it—it makes a mockery of—of—of all this. Of us,” B.J. says the very first time they have this argument. B.J.’s in bed, naked, while Hawkeye paces around, wearing only his robe and looking very agitated.

“Oh, _I’m_ the one ‘making a mockery’ of this relationship? Me??” Hawkeye yells back, as high-strung as a wet cat. “Am I the one that got _rat_ drunk in Tokyo and started—started— wooing and talking about ‘flying to the moon’ and making pinky promises to run off together?!! Hmmm? No! That was you! Those were _your_ stupid rat words. There’s no taking back that’s the night that got us together in the end. The fact that said night happened a little less than ideal manner? Well that’s kind of your fault.”

“Exactly,” B.J. says, pointing a finger at him. “I thought I was wooing you, but you weren’t sure if you were being wooed. I was drunk, and stupid and—and I hurt you. And I don’t want to celebrate a night you tried to forget for the next eight months,” B.J. says earnestly. There’s a beat and then he grins and adds: “Did you know, by the way, a valid contract is only formed at the moment there’s a mutual understanding between the two parties? So Tokyo didn’t count.”

“Surgical like a lawyer,” Hawkeye says coldly. He refills B.J.’s wine glass, but makes a point to do it very angrily so B.J. doesn’t mistake it for a peace offering.

“Ouch. Now, now, hold on, darling,” B.J. says with one hand over his heart like Hawkeye’s shot him. “Let’s not say things we can’t take back.”

“Oh let’s.”

“Funnily enough I read that in the contract law book that _we_ bought so _we_ could negotiate the terms for the lease of _our_ clinic. You know, the same book you won’t let me finish reading?” B.J. says pointedly.

“It’s _retroactive,”_ Hawkeye says, ignoring B.J.’s aside, “I didn’t know how important it was at the time, but if it wasn’t for that night, you wouldn’t have come to Maine and we wouldn’t be here now. Does your little contracts book say anything about whether you can retroactively establish the correct effective date of certain _important_ contracts?” Hawkeye says. He perches on the other side of the bed, now refilling his own wine glass furiously.

“I don’t know. I’d only gotten past the first page of _our_ little contracts book when you marched in here with wine, accused me of forgetting our made-up anniversary, and then started taking off your clothes and throwing them at my head piece by piece. And I had my hands a little full after that,” B.J. says, grinning lasciviously.

“Oh, I didn’t hear you complaining about it at the time,” Hawkeye says haughtily, turning away from B.J. and lifting his chin as high as it’ll go. He’s not really in a snit, they both know, but he enjoys it when B.J. tries to get him out of one.

“You don’t hear me complaining now either,” B.J. says, any trace of the earlier argument gone from his voice.

B.J. puts his own wine glass on the bedside table. Then he reaches out and gently pries Hawkeye’s glass out of his hand too. He puts that away too.

“Never _ever_ complaining,” B.J. tells him again, and then pulls Hawkeye forward by his wrists. “Just to be crystal clear. You can feel free to strip and haul me to bed anywhere, any time. Especially if I’m reading about contracts.”

“Well, not _any_ where _any_ time—“ Hawkeye starts to joke, but right then B.J. bends down and kisses the sensitive skin inside his wrist, first one wrist and then the other.

“Anywhere, any time,” B.J. insists, placing feather light kisses on the tips of his fingers now.

“Beej,” Hawkeye breathes, a little embarrassed that he can be wrecked so easily by such a simple gesture even after all these months.

B.J. cards fingers through his hair. Hawkeye leans into the touch while B.J. kisses his shoulders, his ears, his neck.

“B.J. I—I—“ Hawkeye says uselessly as B.J. kisses a sensitive spot on his neck over and over. And then, when he can’t stand the teasing anymore, he cups B.J.’s face and pulls him up into a fierce kiss. They push and pull at each other, kissing with a hunger that surprises even them considering they’ve already spent a very satisfying hour in bed together. They end up toppling down on the bed, Hawkeye pinned flat on his back and his legs wrapped around B.J. to pull him closer.

“Beej. Beej?” Hawkeye says between kisses.

“Yes, yes. Hawk. Yeah,” B.J. says feverishly, hands carding through his hair.

“B.J.”

“Yeah. Right here. Love you. Love you so much,” B.J. mumbles.

“Beej, I’m sorry,” Hawkeye kisses.

“What for?” B.J. asks, visibly startled. He nearly falls over in surprise.

“You were right.”

B.J.'s worry melts into a grin. “Well, well, well. Look who’s finally ready to admit an anniversary is celebrated on the day two people actually get together.”

“Not that, you fink. I’m going to my grave maintaining that our real, romantic anniversary is today,” Hawkeye says, annoyed. “I’m sorry I made you look after all the boring business stuff while I ran around looking through office catalogues and browsing for cool medical equipment. We’re in this together. It’s our boring contracts book. We figure it out together.”

“Are you kidding?” B.J. laughs. “I wasn’t mad. I never went into this thinking _you’re_ going to be the money guy. And frankly, I’m not the best guy for the job either, even without your angry stripper routine to distract me. I’m just saying...we need to think of something or we’re going to end up performing surgery on street corners and holding out our hats to the crowd for a little spare change,” B.J. says cheerfully.

Hawkeye turns to look at him, his eyebrows raised. B.J. returns the look, clearly thinking the same thing.

“Still beats Korea,” they say in unison, laughing. They kiss again, and it’s just beginning to heat up (B.J. has Hawkeye’s robe pulled all the way down to his elbows) when there’s a shout from downstairs.

“Hawk, your timer thingy went off,” Peg yells from downstairs.

“What?” Hawkeye yells back.

“You said to yell when the timer on the potatoes went off so you could put the chicken cheese thing in the oven. You coming, or what?” Peg shouts.

Hawkeye bangs his head back against the pillows in theatrical despair. “So much for round two. Damn timer,” he mutters, untangling his limbs from B.J.’s reluctantly.

“Coming,” Hawkeye yells back to Peg. And then, quietly, he adds: “We’ve got to get our own place. Living with these two, I keep feeling like I’m a teenager and my mom is about to walk in on me getting heavy with my boyfriend.”

“Please don’t call my wife your ‘mom,’” B.J. groans affectionately, ruffling Hawkeye’s hair.

“Please don’t call her your wife while we’re in bed!” Hawkeye says, clutching imaginary pearls.

“Hawk, you literally slide into bed every night saying ‘I don’t usually sleep with married men,’” B.J. shoots back, grinning.

Hawkeye gives him a cheesy grin. “Well, when I say it, it’s a fun sexy joke to make myself feel better about how you’re technically still married to someone else. When you say it, you sound like a no good two-timing schmuck,” Hawkeye says sweetly, topping it off with a kiss.

There’s loud banging below them, and they both know Carla is tapping her cane against the kitchen ceiling, which also happens to be their floor. “You two clowns better come make dinner or you’ll have to explain to Erin that she doesn’t have dinner because you were too busy playing footsy...or handsy, or whatever.”

Hawkeye reluctantly untangles his limbs from B.J.’s.

“Real charmer that one. I can absolutely see why Peg left you for her,” Hawkeye mutters, pulling his t-shirt on.

“The heart wants what the heart wants. And I guess both Peg and I are drawn to live hand grenades,” B.J. says with a dreamy look on his face.

Clara taps her cane against their floor again.

“We gotta get our own place,” B.J. agrees, bolting up and pulling his shorts on.

“Happy anniversary, darling,” Hawkeye says, giving him a peck on the cheek. He finishes getting dressed and heads down.

“Ladies, fear not,” Hawkeye belts out as he bounds down the stairs, “Chef Pierce is about to astonish you with the best Chicken Cordon Bleu of your lives.”

At the bottom of the stairs, Hawkeye looks over his shoulder, expecting to find B.J. just a step behind, only to see him frozen where Hawk left him, all the way up the stairs and still standing by the bed, holding his shirt in his hand and staring at Hawkeye intently.

“What?” Hawkeye asks, a little self-conscious.

B.J.’s face splits into a smile, warm and reassuring. “Nothing at all. Just you.”

Hawkeye can’t help smiling like an idiot. “You’re crazy,” he tells B.J.

“Crazy for _you_.”

“Ugh.”

B.J. laughs. Pulls on his shirt and follows Hawkeye only to freeze again halfway down the stairs.

“What now? If you dally any longer, your wife, your wife’s wife, and your daughter will all starve,” Hawkeye teases.

“We’d both be rotten at running anything but an operating room,” B.J. says thoughtfully.

“Yeah, yeah. I heard you. We have no head for business. We’re gonna live in a shoebox. We’re gonna subsist on matzo and the power of love. We’re gonna hang up our shingle in the middle of Union Square and let the chips fall where they may,” Hawkeye says.

“No, I mean, _we’d_ be rotten at running the business side of things, but you know who wouldn’t? You know who could whip our landlord, the medical supplier, and pharmaceutical companies into shape without needing to read a book about it, _and_ has a top notch head for medicine to boot?” B.J. says, grinning in that way he does when he’s sure he’s thought of a devious idea that Hawk will love.

“Who? Who?” Hawkeye says, feeding off of B.J.’s giddy energy.

“Major Margaret Houlihan.”

Hawkeye lets out a whoop and then a delighted cackle. “No! Oh, Beej! This is truly one of your finest. But you don’t think she’d...? Would she?”

“We won’t know unless we ask,” B.J. says at the exact time as Hawkeye answers his own question with: “Only one way to find out, I suppose.”

They both cackle again and then they kiss, and kiss, excited little pecks that bubble with laughter. Hawkeye leans forward, half-draped on the bannister, and B.J. bends nearly in half to reach him from a higher step.

“Hawkeye! Erin is home in twenty minutes. Either you’re coming or I’m throwing out all your food and going out to buy hamburgers,” Clara thunders from the other room.

“Coming. I swear,” Hawkeye says, pulling back from B.J. with a sheepish little grin.

“Right. First, chicken. Then, Margaret,” B.J. says.

“First chicken, then Margaret,” Hawkeye agrees, heading for the kitchen.

***

On their last evening in Tokyo, the party in their lounge is still going strong, Americans and Japanese and French all mingling together, when a drunk Hawkeye hauls a very drunk B.J. away from their table and up to his room. On the way, B.J. makes him agree that they'll have one more drink so he can "savor their last R&R."

“Beej, about the whole last R&R thing. I really don’t want you to get your hopes up about the end of the war.”

“I know! I know! Come on. Just humor me.”

Hawkeye accepts the bourbon and soda B.J. is holding out, and then stretches out on the bed next to him.

“You look very handsome in your uniform,” B.J. tells him with his dopey drunken grin.

“Very funny. Thanks,” Hawkeye says. The only part of R&R he hates is having to be in uniform.

“No, I mean it. I know you hate it on principle. I do too. But you look quite dashing in it, Captain Pierce,” B.J. tells him, waggling his eyebrows.

Hawkeye swallows. “Thanks,” he says again. He rubs at a crease on his pants, suddenly feeling shy.

“And you’re funny too,” B.J. says.

“Is it my birthday? Knock it out.”

“And nice.”

“Pffff. Ok, seriously Beej. What’s up.”

“You _are_. Nice and funny,” B.J. insists.

“I like you too, Beej.”

“ _But_ ,” B.J. says.

“And _there_ it is.”

“But I wish you’d be honest,” B.J. says.

“What? I’m the model of honesty.”

B.J. raises his eyebrows and looks at Hawkeye for a long time. “Today on the boat.”

“Yeah? What about it?” Hawkeye says, aiming for nonchalant and coming off panicked even to his own ears. What had B.J. figured out?

“Have you ever thought that maybe he just needs a light from you?” B.J. asks. He turns so that he’s laying on his side on the bed, facing Hawkeye. Hawkeye thinks they look like they’re kids at a sleepover.

“Who needs what?”

“Trapper. A light. From you,” B.J. explains. “Maybe he just needs a sign from you that it’s safe to reach out. Maybe he feels terrible that he had to leave without seeing you and now he feels wrong-footed, doesn’t know how to fix it, isn’t sure if he’d still be welcome.”

Hawkeye feels like he’s missed several key conversations leading up to this one.

“Uh,” he says.

“Today on the boat,” B.J. says again, like it explains everything.

Hawkeye waits for him to say more but he doesn’t. “You’re gonna have to give me a clue Beej.”

B.J. seems to struggle with his words for a moment. He glares at the rest of his drink and puts it on the floor by the bed.

“Sometimes you seem lonely,” B.J. explains.

Hawkeye cannot fathom the connection between the two thoughts. He tells B.J. as much with his eyebrows.

“You miss Trapper,” B.J. says. “And, look, maybe reading poetry today under the cherry blossoms has got me in a mood. But I think we should tell the people we care about that we care about them. If you wish you could talk to Trapper, maybe he wishes the same thing. Why not say so?”

“I don’t wish,” Hawkeye starts to explain, and fails. “I miss Trapper. But I'm not lonely. Well, I _am_ lonely, but not today, never when I’m with you.”

B.J. grins. And he then reaches out and holds Hawkeye’s hand. “Honest?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Hawkeye says cutely. He holds B.J.’s hand right back.

“Oh, Hawk. You can’t die,” B.J. says, horrified.

“No. It’s an expression. And that’s your cue to hit the sack, doughboy,” Hawkeye says affectionately. Hawkeye leans over and turns off the lamp. The room is bathed in moonlight. When he tries to extract himself from the bed, B.J. holds his hand harder and starts tracing each of his fingers one by one.

“I’ve always liked your hands. You have nice hands. They’re...elegant.”

Hawkeye can’t even begin to form words. He blinks into the darkness several times. “Well, now I know you’re rat drunk.”

“Maybe. But I think you have pretty hands when I’m sober too.”

And then, before Hawkeye can even register that anything is happening, he sees B.J. move and feels the unmistakable press of lips, B.J.'s lips, feather light, against the very tip of his index finger and then his ring finger.

“Beej. What are you—“ he stammers.

B.J. snores in response.

***

Hawkeye gets back home in July.

It’s October when he finally has that phone call with B.J.

It’s a freezing evening in early November when B.J. shows up in Maine. He’s sitting by the fire reading an Agatha Christie novel when he hears the rap on the door.

It’s only 5 PM, but it’s dark as midnight out there, and it’s unusually cold even for Maine in November. When he opens the door, the only colors on the street are black and white. Even the lawn in front of his place is frozen over white with ice. But B.J. is standing there wrapped in the blue coat they’d ordered together from the Sears catalogue and looking, Hawkeye thinks, like someone just dipped him in the California sun and then plopped him right there to shiver on Hawkeye’s doorstep. He’s golden against the dark backdrop.

All the nervousness he’s felt about seeing B.J. again melts away on the spot. There’s no telling who reaches for the other first. They hug over and over, clinging to each other and swaying on the spot, delirious with it. There’s no self-consciousness. It’s B.J. It’s the person he’s gotten along with the best in his whole life.

“I’m making you stand out there in the cold. Come in, come in,” he insists. He takes B.J.’s suitcase from him and drags him inside by his lapels. But the moment they’re both inside, he can’t even wait to close the door behind them, he hugs B.J. again and B.J. hugs back, holding him so tight it almost hurts.

“Beej! Beej. You’re here. You’re really here,” he laughs.

“Captain Hunnicutt, here in the flesh. Reporting for duty,” he says jokingly.

“Blegh. Don’t say that. Not even as a joke.”

“Sorry,” B.J. says, grinning ear-to-ear and not the least bit sorry. He’s cleanly shaven but he looks...more unkempt, more like Hawkeye’s B.J. than the buttoned up Captain he’d first met. Hawkeye could kiss him, but instead he just closes the door against the cold and drags both Beej and the suitcase towards the living room.

“Come on, come on. Let’s warm you up, let’s get you a drink,” he says like all of this is normal. And then he stops, because it occurs to him again that none of this is normal. This is B.J. This is B.J. in his living room. He pats B.J.’s cheek affectionately, and says: “Beej! You’re really here.”

“Really here,” B.J. agrees, with a smile that looks just as dopey as his own feels.

“I had no idea you were coming. I thought you’d call, have me meet you at the airport.”

“I thought it would be more romantic this way,” B.J. deadpans, huddling by the fireplace for warmth. “Getting lost, almost freezing to death on the way here, knocking on a few neighbors’ doors first by accident. I like the little leading man air it gives me.”

Hawkeye laughs. _It is more romantic this way, which is bad news for my sanity, _Hawkeye thinks.

Hawkeye goes to the kitchen for a clean glass and mixes B.J. a bourbon and soda, all the while straining every rules of rhyme and rhythm to sing “I got Captain Hunnicutt in my living room” to the tune of “I get a kick out of you.”

_Mere bourbon doesn’t delight me at all,_

_So tell me why it dooooo_

_That I got Captain Hunnicutt in my living room._

B.J. grins at the performance, remaining huddled by the fire, and accepts his bourbon and soda with a grateful nod when it’s delivered to him with a flourish just as Hawkeye hits “living rooooom.”

Hawkeye flops down in his armchair and stretches like a cat. All the nerves and doubt he’d felt about seeing B.J. again seem so far away. It’s almost laughable. He can be happy just like this, just having B.J. in his life again. He could kick himself for trying to go cold turkey. Why would he want to quit the best thing that’s ever happened to him? Having Beej as a friend is so much better than being entirely Beej-less. All the fun they could have now that there was no war looming over them!

“Beej, we’re gonna have so much fun. How long are you staying? Enough for a weekend trip to Boston? Don’t get me wrong. You’re gonna love Crabapple Cove. But we’re gonna run out of attractions pretty quick. First stop, a very old house that might be haunted. Second stop, all three shops on Main Street. Oh, then, the maple donut place—“

The rest of the sentence freezes on his lips, because B.J. is staring at him with a dead serious look and clearly shares none of Hawkeye's giddy energy.

“What?” he asks, a little self-conscious about his excitement.

“Nothing,” B.J. says, steady where Hawkeye is jumpy. “Just a crisp winter night. You by the fire wearing a smoking jacket, or something that could pass for it anyway,” B.J. explains, looking fond.

“Oh, I see. Fancy yourself Lana Turner in this scenario, do you?” Hawkeye jokes.

“Something like that,” B.J. says quietly, not laughing.

Of course, when Hawkeye had made up that story a hundred years ago in Korea as a way of entertaining B.J., poor Beej had never stood a chance with Lana. Because it was Hawkeye’s fantasy, after all. And because it was Hawkeye’s fantasy _B.J_. had pushed _Lana_ away when the lint from her angora got all over his smoking jacket. Hawkeye can’t think of anything he wants less than pushing this Lana away.

As if reading his mind, B.J. adds: “Although, you see, I made sure not to wear my angora sweater. Wouldn’t want you pushing me away.”

“Incurable flirt,” Hawkeye teases.

B.J., uncharacteristically, has no comeback. He doesn’t even seem to register that Hawkeye has spoken. He takes a sip of his drink and stares into the fire.

They’re both silent for a long moment until it starts to make Hawkeye nervous.

“Right, so road trip to Boston?” he suggests. “Oh my god, what if we ambush Charles at work. Ok hear me out, we sneak into Mass General—“

“Hawk. I’m so, so in love with you,” B.J. interrupts, like it’s being punched out of him.

Well, that sure pulls the rug out from under Hawkeye. He blinks several times.

“Ok. Hmmm. I don’t think we went over this bit in rehearsal. Are we going to ad-lib now?” Hawkeye jokes, trying not to give away that his heart hammering away in his chest.

Has he been figured out? Is this B.J.’s way of setting him up for a punchline? But no. B.J. would never be so cruel as to prank him about _this_. Unless, he thinks, unless B.J. has figured it out but thinks it’s a harmless little crush that they can both laugh about...

“I’m not joking,” B.J. says. Slowly, deliberately, he puts his drink down on the mantle of the fireplace, and walks over to Hawkeye’s armchair. He kneels by it, and takes Hawkeye’s left hand between both of his. “Hawk?”

“Hurg?” Hawkeye says, staring down at his hand sandwiched between B.J.’s and feeling very stupid all of a sudden.

“Tell me you want this. Tell me I didn’t imagine everything. Did I? Am I crazy?” 

They sit with that for a moment, both staring at their joined hands.

Hawkeye shakes his head. There’s no way. There’s no way. It’s just a joke, a bit that B.J. thinks he’s in on. A hundred times they’ve acted out dramatic little bits, scenes from romantic movies or completely made-up little sketches, for a laugh. And this one is just hitting too close to home for Hawkeye, so he’s not catching the angle, he’s not getting the joke.

“Your comedic delivery has suffered from our separation. No matter, we’ll get you back up to speed in short order,” Hawkeye says theatrically, hoping they can still joke their way back to a comfortable place.

“Hawk. Please, be serious. Please,” B.J. begs. He says it like Hawkeye is his executioner. And this really gets Hawkeye’s goat, because how dare B.J. plead with him when it’s _him_ ruining _Hawkeye’s_ life.

“You’re not funny, and you’re _insane_ , you’re out of your mind—your pranks—you’re—you—even for you—this is next level—I—“

“Okay, okay. I’ll go ahead and put you down as ‘none for me, thanks.’ You can stop. I got it,” B.J. says softly, looking away. Even now, as he draws into himself, B.J.’s wearing that sweet little smile, like Hawkeye’s told a good joke and B.J.’s just ever so sorry he’s too tired to appreciate it properly.

It hits Hawkeye like a ton of bricks. “You’re not kidding. You’re—you’re—“

“Serious. Yeah. I’m sorry, Hawk. I misread a bunch of signs, on the phone, in Tokyo, and even before that.”

“In Tokyo? Beej, I—“ Hawkeye whispers.

B.J. isn’t listening. “And I took a few dozen wrong turns. It’s—I’m sorry, Hawk. Just plain sorry. Making you uncomfortable was the last thing I wanted,” B.J. says, not looking at him. He lets go of Hawkeye’s hand awkwardly, like he’s just realized he’s still holding it, and moves to get up. “God. I’m sorry,” he says again. He says it like he hates himself. And that’s what spurs Hawkeye into action.

“Beej. No, _no_ ,” Hawkeye says and reaches out with both hands before B.J. can retreat. He grabs for any part of B.J. he can find, and ends up with the retreating hand and a good bit of sleeve. He clutches it tight, too tight.

B.J. stares at their joined hands, and his self-deprecating little smile turns confused and then a little hopeful. Slowly, he drags his gaze from their hands to Hawk’s face, and must see the truth written all over him, because every taut cord in him is cut loose at once.

“Oh,” B.J. breathes, like he’s learning to breathe again. “Really? _Really_ , really?”

Hawkeye has to fight against every instinct that would usually have him working in a little joke, lightening the moment, dancing around it.

“Every minute of every day since I met you. How I love you, it’s so immense...to carry it...it carries me more than I carry it,” he says with all the tenderness he feels.

“Oh,” B.J. says again, his face splitting into the well-loved B.J. grin Hawkeye has thought about every day since he last saw it. “You’re not turning me down.”

“Beej. I’ll turn over a new leaf, turn the tide, _Turn of the Screw,_ turn up when you least expect me, turn the tables on you, turn your frown upside down, but I’d never ever turn you down.”

They laugh for a moment like the earth didn’t just tilt on its axis.

And then—because there’s still the matter of Peggy, and Erin, and their house in Mill Valley; because Hawkeye realizes he can’t bank on a joke B.J. made in Tokyo when drunk; because this sober version of B.J. hasn’t promised him (or asked of him) anything yet; because being in love and being together (Hawkeye knows) don’t always go hand-in-hand—because of all of these things, he lays the choice (and his heart) at B.J.’s feet. He thinks of it as penance for the three seconds he accidentally made B.J. believe there could be a universe where Hawkeye would turn him down:

“I’d give anything to have you in my life, to have you even a little bit, Beej. Anything. But I also know—that you can’t give me—I’d never ask you to—“ he stammers a bit as B.J. stares at him, perplexed. “What I’m trying to say is: it’s up to you to decide what you want. If going my whole life without laying eyes on you again is the market rate for your happiness, consider it paid. I don’t know how, but I’ll do it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?!” B.J. interjects, the dreamy look on his face replaced with a scrunched up sour one. The familiar annoyed expression is so incongruous with this wholly new image of B.J. on his knees and clasping Hawkeye’s hand like an overwrought Romeo that it makes Hawkeye laugh, which seems to annoy B.J. more.

“I’m talking about me wanting you,” Hawkeye says hysterically. And suddenly, it’s not enough that they’re already holding hands, Hawkeye needs to touch B.J., to reassure himself this is real, to feel B.J. He runs his hands up B.J.’s arms, his shoulders, his neck. B.J. reaches back, and suddenly they’re both in a flurry of movement, grasping for each other again and again, their clumsy, eager fingers running over each other’s elbows, wrists, arms, necks, cheeks like they’re clinging to each other against the pull of some invisible current that’s threatening to tear them apart.

“That sounds really good to me. I don’t see the problem, I’m afraid,” B.J. says, giddy. His fingers are tangled in Hawkeye’s hair. “You’ll have to tell me real slow. The blood’s not going in the right direction right now.”

“I’m talking about me wanting things that you’d feel guilty giving me. I’m talking about how you, you, you don’t cheat, that’s not you. I’m talking about the house in Mill Valley, the house you’re building in Stinton Beach—“

“Hawk—“

“I’m talking about how I’ve wanted you since Kimpo, and I held it down, I held it tight, I never let it touch you. But now it’s out here in the open. What are we gonna do?! I can’t keep my hands off of you. Well, I couldn’t keep my hands off of you before, either, I’m sure you noticed. But at least I stopped myself from imagining things. Now—“

“Listen. I meant to explain—“

“Now, I can’t help it, I don’t know if I can stop. And I can’t be the reason for your unhappiness. So, what choice do we have? I need to stay away from you, for a long time, maybe forever. How could you do this to me? Why did you—“ he says, bordering on manic.

“Hawk,” B.J. says firmly. But it really means _shut up for just a second,_ so Hawkeye does.

B.J., looking exasperated, shakes his head a bit, and laughs. Then he presses a quick kiss to Hawkeye’s hand, and gets to his feet. And just when Hawkeye thinks that’s it, that B.J. has finally come to his senses and is about to walk away from him, B.J. props one knee on the chair in the space between Hawkeye’s hip and the armrest—his other foot planted firmly on the ground—bends down, cups Hawkeye’s face and kisses him, sweet and sure.

Hawkeye melts into him. And then, a thought.

“Beej. But. But. What about—“

“Peg sends her best. The divorce isn’t final yet. The whole process is a mess. See, she had to sue me for divorce, and then I had to default, but then there’s still a hearing—“ B.J. shakes his head. “Anyway, she said I’d drive her crazy if I waited any longer to come out here and kiss you. She’s happy, she’s actually...See, now, this is an amazing story. Do you remember when the gutter back home needed to be cleaned? And I was going on about how Peg was gonna fall for our handsome handyman? Well, she was trying to be frugal, of course, so instead of calling him she asked the neighbor’s wife to come help her clean the gutter and then—“

“Beej,” Hawkeye says.

B.J. looks down at him, and seems to remember where he is. “Right, right. Not the time. Remind her to tell you, she tells it better anyway,” B.J. says.

“Ok,” Hawkeye says, dazed. He’s not sure he understands anything that’s happening.

And then B.J.’s strokes Hawkeye’s cheekbone with his thumb and it doesn’t matter because Hawkeye’s mind goes blank. He melts into the touch, aches from it, from how softly B.J. is cupping his face, from how B.J. is smiling like it makes him happy just to be touching Hawkeye, to be holding his face, to be touching him. Hawkeye squeezes his eyes shut, overcome by the impossible thought that this could be nearly as momentous to B.J. as it is to him. He turns his face further into the touch, nuzzles B.J.’s hand, and kisses the palm tenderly.

B.J. groans. “God. You. You,” he says and bends down again to kiss him, this time with more intent. But when Hawkeye pushes up into the kiss, and tries to wrap every limb around B.J.’s body, to pull him closer, to have them pressed together, to make it faster and messier, B.J. doesn’t let him. Instead, B.J. presses him—gently but firmly—back against the chair, so that each kiss—deep and hungry—is punctuated by a moment of separation. B.J. pulls back from him and then kisses him again, and again, and again, in a maddeningly unpredictable rhythm that has Hawkeye nearly out of his mind, groaning, trying to chase each kiss, arching up for more, trying to get close.

“Beej, please, let me—“

“Tell me a fantasy.”

“What?”

“Tell me a fantasy. For old time’s sake,” B.J. teases.

“Let me get this straight—“

“Oh, I’d rather you didn’t.”

“—we finally have each other, you’re half in my lap, kissing me, and I’m begging you to let me touch you, and you want to talk?”

“Yup,” B.J. says delightedly, peppering kisses against his jaw and still carding his fingers through Hawkeye’s hair.

Hawkeye sighs. “Fine. I walk into a jazz bar. There you are across the room.”

B.J. smiles. “Yeah? Am I leaning against the bar with two martinis in my hand? Do our eyes meet across the room?”

“Nope,” Hawkeye says, popping the p at the end, “You’re dancing with Lana Turner—“

“You and your Lana Turner thing, I swear to god—“

“Hey! Don’t look at me. You’re the one who’s inviting her and taking her dancing. I'm beginning to get jealous,” Hawkeye grins. “Right, anyway. You’re slow dancing, and over her shoulder, you see a dark handsome stranger walk into the bar. And now our eyes meet across the room.”

B.J. rolls his eyes. “Let me guess. I push her away and come over to dance with you.”

“How _ever_ did you know?”

B.J. manages not to laugh, but just barely. “Ok. My fault for not being more specific. Tell me one where it’s just the two of us, and I get to touch you.”

“Ohhhh,” Hawkeye says, feigning sudden realization, “you want a _fantasy_.”

“Yeah,” B.J. says. Hawkeye can feel B.J. grinning against his throat. “Tell me what you imagined.”

“Weren’t you listening? I didn’t let myself imagine.”

“Tell me what you didn’t let yourself imagine.”

Hawkeye glares. “I’d show you if you’d stop talking and let me have at you.”

“Come on. Please? I want to know what you like.”

“A lot of stuff Beej. I can’t—Fine. You. Pressed up right behind me. Your hands, on me. Touching me. Your hand slipping under my shirt, touching my chest, my hips. Your fingers slipping below my waistband, but just an inch. Teasing me until I’m writhing for you, telling me you love seeing me so desperate for you without even trying. Me touching you, holding you in my hand, having you in my mouth. The noises you’d make. I’d make it so good for you. The way you’d look down at me like, like, you like it—looking at me like it’s not just, not just what I’m doing, like you like that it’s me, like you like _me_ —“

“I do. God. I do,” B.J. groans, grinds just once against Hawkeye’s leg, and pulls back, still holding Hawkeye against the chair. “What else? Tell me.”

Hawkeye can’t help but arch up now, desperate. “Please, Beej. Please, let me touch you.”

B.J. runs a finger along the seam of Hawkeye's jeans, and presses a light kiss to his neck. “Just one more. Please? Please, darling?”

“Yeah, ok. Us in bed, naked. A big proper bed. You on top of me. Me on my back, with my legs wrapped around you. How you’d feel rocking against me, feeling you flush against me, skin on skin. Other times, you taking me in the swamp. In my cot, lying on our sides, my back pressed against you. You right behind me, with a blanket to cover us. Your fingers, really really slow. Telling me to be good, telling me to be quiet. I can’t, it’s too much, I’m running my mouth. Letting me suck on your fingers to shut me up when you take me. Sometimes, I imagine—I don’t imagine your mouth, your mouth on me, your mouth. Sorry—-I don’t know if—it’s ok if you don’t like—I don’t know—“

“Anything, yes. I want to be on my knees for you, Hawk. To make you feel so good.”

Hawkeye groans at that. “You make love just like you make pranks, did you know? More build up than anyone asked for.”

B.J. grins. “Oh, but I always make sure the payoff is worth it.”

“I love you, and I’m about to combust. Can’t you give a guy a little something?” Hawkeye whines.

“Hawk, I’m going to give you everything, everything,” B.J. promises and then he takes two fistfuls of Hawkeye’s t-shirt, and hoists him to his feet, kissing him and pushing him backward out of the living room simultaneously.

Hawkeye breaks the kiss. “Now _this_ is a wrong turn,” he says.

“Oh. Oh? What’s wrong?” B.J. asks gentle and worried.

“Don’t be silly. I meant the bedroom’s _that_ way,” Hawkeye says, grinning. “You’re taking us to the broom closet. Now, if a man has some residual fantasies about having another man in a supply closet in Korea, that’s no one’s business but his. But no more closet for me, thanks. Personally, I think a bed—“

B.J. sweeps Hawk into his arms and shuts him up with a kiss (they’re both laughing into it) and then spins them around, like it’s a dance, and marches him backwards into the bedroom.

***

“You had me at Rudyard Kipling,” Hawkeye tell him later when they are drinking bourbon in bed, naked.

B.J. laughs, warm and bright. “You had me at ‘I let that geisha take one too many laps on my back.’”

This has Hawkeye cackling and spilling bourbon on the white bedsheets. “See what you did, you lunatic? I paid two dollars for these sheets,” he chides. “And I was trying to be romantic, funny guy.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry I compulsively make a joke out of serious moments. It’s a flaw of mine. Fortunately, _you’re_ above all that, so at least we’ll balance each other out,” B.J. deadpans.

“Fink,” Hawkeye says trying not to laugh. “Beeeeej. Come on. Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“When _did_ you?”

“Ok, you’re right. To be perfectly honest...You had me at ‘I missed Trapper by ten minutes,’” B.J. tells him, his lips quivering with good humor.

“Beej. Knock it out. I loved you first. You’re just saying that to win,” Hawkeye whines, placing his chin on B.J.’s chest.

“Win? Only you would be competitive about falling in love, Hawk. Only you,” B.J. sighs.

“It is and I’m going to win it because I fell in love with you first,” Hawkeye says.

“No way. I walked up to you. You weren’t even _looking_ at me. You said ‘I missed Trapper by ten minutes’ and you were all huffy, with your hands on your hips. I thought you were adorable. I didn’t know who Trapper was or why you’d missed him, but I remember thinking ‘Oh, he won’t look at me, I have to do something to make him notice me, I don’t know why but I just need him to look at me.’ It was only about a week later, when you said you were going to use the death certificate to get out of the army and go home that I realized I was seriously obsessed with you. I walked back to the Swamp and I just sat there, knowing you wouldn’t leave, but worried that if you were—I wouldn’t survive without you.”

“Beej.”

“But it wasn’t until two years later that I realized…this is all possible. That I could want what I want, and you could possibly say yes.”

“In Tokyo,” Hawk realizes.

“In vino veritas, I suppose,” B.J. confirms. “I looked at you in the bed in that hotel room, and I told you the truth, and you looked at me so sweetly. It was the first time I let myself think—why not? Why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t we, really? Before that night, I knew I wanted something from you, but it was just out of reach, I couldn’t name it.”

“I tried not to think about that night every day for the past eight months,” Hawkeye admits.

“Hawk, I’m so—“ B.J. says, his eyes a little misty, and gathers him up fiercely in his arms. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? I’m not,” Hawkeye laughs, “if you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here right now. What’s eight months compared to this? I’d have waited my whole life.”

“Still,” B.J. says gravely, “I’m going to find a way to make it up to you.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I have a few ideas,” Hawkeye says with a dirty grin.

B.J. returns it. “Oh, yeah? Do they involve Lana?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Then I’m all in, Hawk.”

***

It’s nearly a year before all of this—on that Last Night in Tokyo—that B.J. tells him he’s gonna marry him. Has it been less than a year? It feels like a lifetime ago.

Up in B.J.’s hotel room, Hawkeye waits to make sure a very drunk B.J. is in deep sleep and then tries, once more, to extract himself from the bed. This, again, causes B.J. to hang on tighter to his hand.

“Stay,” B.J. says.

“Beej, I can’t sleep here. People will talk,” Hawkeye says, only half kidding.

“Let people talk. I’m gonna marry you one day. It’s not scandalous to sleep in the same room if you’re getting married. Boy, will we show them when they get the wedding invitation.”

“Ok Beej.”

“I’m gonna go home and talk to Peg. And then I’m gonna show up at your doorstep Hawk, and I’m gonna marry you. I’m gonna wife you.”

B.J. seems to think he has said something hilarious because he dissolves into giggles. Hawkeye sits there, his back against the headboard, hating the joke but not about to snap at B.J. who’s clearly drunker than Hawkeye has ever seen him and nowhere near alert enough to sense Hawkeye’s annoyance.

“Not possible I’m sorry to say. We’re both guys,” Hawkeye tells him.

B.J. giggles. “Oh you know what I mean. Husband you. Whatever.”

This annoys Hawkeye even more. “I meant, they don’t let two Captains get married to each other. It’s all a part of the Church’s anti-Captain-on-Captain agenda,” he jokes.

“Not in Church, dumb dumb. We’ll get married in my backyard. My backyard is as open minded as a Billy Wilder movie.”

“Fine, Beej. Go to sleep now.”

“Ok. But do you think I have a shot?” B.J. asks wistfully.

“Between the whiskey and the sake? I think you’ll find sleep as soon as you close your eyes and stop talking so much. But I can smack you over the head if it’d help.”

“No, silly. A shot at marrying you. Would you marry me?”

“As much as I like Peg, I don’t think being her sister-wife is the life for me.”

B.J. giggles some more and presses his face into his pillow.

“You’re funny, Hawk. Come on. Be serious.”

“One of us has to be. But I don’t see why it’s gotta be me.”

“Ok, I’ll be serious. Dead serious. If I were...marriedless. If I were...without marriage. Hmmm. What’s the word...oh, unmarried. Would you? Marry me?” B.J. says.

Hawkeye bangs his head back against the headboard once to curse his luck and then looks down at B.J. who’s looking up at him with his dopey smile and his drunk earnest eyes. Hawkeye thaws a bit.

“Anyone would marry you, Beej,” he says honestly, picking some imaginary lint off his pants.

“The question wasn’t about anyone. Would _you_? If you could?” B.J. insists.

This makes Hawkeye throw his hands up in frustration. “Oh oh. This is a cross-exam now? Are you a doctor or a prosecutor? Yeah, fine. I’d marry you. Okay?”

“You _would?_ That’s amazing news. Really good,” B.J. says with a stupid dopey smile.

“Yeah, B.J. I’d totally marry you, okay? I’d marry you in a heartbeat. You’re the man of my dreams. I doodle your name and draw little hearts around it in my notebook. You happy?” Hawkeye says with great contempt.

“Oh boy,” B.J. says, almost absent-mindedly. He hugs his pillow close and sinks into it with a grin.

“Yeah. _Oh boy. Whoopdy doo,”_ Hawkeye retorts, dryly.

“Thanks a million, Hawk. You won’t regret this. I’ll be a good husband,” B.J. says into his pillow.

“I’m sure you already are.”

“No. I mean a good husband _to you_. I’d be good to you.”

“You already are,” Hawkeye says, melting a bit. “Good to me, I mean,” he clarifies hastily, his cheeks burning. _Not my husband_ , goes unspoken.

B.J. doesn’t notice. He keeps rambling on incoherently. “Take care of you. Make you happy. Make you forget the war.”

“You already do. Now, go to sleep,” Hawkeye tells him. He’s on the verge of tears.

“But after the war, I mean. Who’s gonna take care of you? You’re not meant to be alone, Hawk. You think you are. But you need to be with someone, someone who gets you, who takes care of you, who makes you laugh. That’s why you should marry me, see? It’s perfect.”

“That’s what this is about? You’re worried about how pathetically lonely and off my rocks I’m gonna be after the war?” Hawkeye realizes, laughing.

Any lingering annoyance melts right out of him. B.J. isn’t just making a joke out of the idea of the two of them being married for the hell of it. He’s just worried about Hawkeye like always and his drunk mind has come up with a non-sensical and convoluted solution to the problem.

“You really are quite sweet, Beej,” he tells B.J. because he can’t help it.

“Sweet _on you,”_ B.J. says. He lifts his head from the pillow and tries to wink, but it looks more like a grimace.

“Very smooth. How could I ever resist?” Hawkeye deadpans. He’s filled with so much affection for B.J. there’s no room left for the hurt he felt just a moment before.

“Hell _yeah_ , I’m smooth. Smooth like a...smooth like...a smooth husband. A smooth husband of yours. Your smooth husband.”

“Sure, sure,” Hawkeye says agreeably, trying not to laugh.

“Gonna woo you. And kiss you. All very smoothly,” B.J. says absently into his pillow.

“You’re dreaming again,” Hawkeye tells him.

“Hawk?”

“Yeah, Beej?”

“I think I’m very drunk.”

“You _don’t_ say.”

“Afraid so. Drunker than I’ve ever been without passing out.”

“If you’re drunk, who’s gonna drive us home? Where’s the good husband I was promised?”he teases.

“Oh no,” B.J. says, crestfallen.

“Yeah. ‘Oh no!’” Hawkeye eggs him on.

B.J. raises his head from the pillow for a moment, squints in concentration, takes in Hawkeye’s amused expression, and then laughs. “You’re pulling my leg!” he guffaws. “I’ll be sober by the time we need to go home tomorrow.”

“At this rate I wouldn’t be too sure,” Hawkeye mutters to himself.

“I’ll drive us, soberly,” B.J. promises.

“You’ll drive us. All the way from Japan to Korea?”

“Yeah, all the way.”

“Well, ain’t I a lucky guy to have a miracle fiancé like that.”

“Are you kidding? That’s nothing. I’ll drive you to the moon if you marry me. Like that song... _drive me to the moon_ ,” B.J. sings.

“ _Fly_ me to the moon, darling.”

“Oh right,” B.J. says amiably. “See? We’re good for each other. We’d be happy together, Hawk.”

“Ok,” Hawkeye says. He’s too tired to argue the premise again.

“Lie down. Let me tell you,” B.J. says. And Hawkeye does. He feels like a freezing man giving himself over to the cold. He’s exhausted and he has no fight left in him. He lies down next to B.J. He tries for a safe distance away, but it’s not as safe as remaining seated or, better yet, walking out the door. B.J. grabs his hand again and says: “We’ll get a little house close to Peg so she and Erin can come over all the time.”

“That sounds nice.”

“I’d make you that french toast you like. Real bread, real eggs, real vanilla. Every Sunday.”

“Hmmm. I’d kill you for a French toast right now,” Hawkeye agrees.

“Drive into work together. No enemy fire to dodge at all, just bad traffic on the Bay Bridge. Drive into our own little clinic. We’d do good. Overbill from the rich and give to the poor.”

“I can see it now. Pierce & Hunnicutt, surgeons at law,” Hawkeye says, playing along.

“Actually, it’d be Hunnicutt & Pierce, alphabetically speaking.”

“Oh, he’s _driving_ us to Korea, but _this_ he’s not too drunk for,” Hawkeye huffs.

“You’re in, then?” B.J. says. He’s grinning with his eyes closed, clearly already half way to sleep.

“Yeah,” Hawkeye says to shut him up.

“Promise?”

“Beej, you won’t even remember this conversation in the morning.”

“Will too.”

“Will not. Go to sleep.”

“Not until you promise. If you mean it.”

“Okay, I promise. We’ll get married and start our own practice and hold hands on the way to work and eat french toast with Erin and Peg on the beach. And we’ll all be one big family. Happy?”

B.J. opens his eyes just long enough to give him a real smile.

“Over the moon,” B.J. says sweetly.

“Good. Now go to sleep,” Hawkeye begs.

“Whatever you say, dear,” B.J. says. He practically hugs Hawkeye’s hand to his chest, and closes his eyes.

Hawkeye looks at their joined hands. It’s nice. Hawkeye decides he can have nice for one night even though it means Sidney Freedman will have to come and therapy the hell out of him in a few months. _He’s holding my hand and not because it’s cold_. He closes his eyes and tries to will his stupid heart from pumping his stupid blood so goddamn fast.

“Hawk?” B.J. says.

“Hmmm?” Hawkeye replies.

B.J. doesn’t say anything more. When he opens his eyes, B.J. is looking at him steadily, looking more sober than he has since they set foot in Tokyo.

“Go ahead and be like this all you want, Hawk. You’re gonna have such egg on your face when I marry you,” B.J. says quietly, like it’s a threat.

Hawkeye’s surprised laugh rips out of him before he can even process what B.J.’s said. When he catches his breath for long enough to properly see again, B.J. is smiling at him, looking very pleased with himself.

“Egg, Hawk. All over your stupid smug _married_ face,” B.J. says again, smiling.

“Looking forward,” he says agreeably. He must be drunker than he realized because not only is he smiling like an idiot, he’s almost believing Beej.

B.J. looks at him for a long minute, and then gives him a decisive little nod. “Good,” B.J. says, as though that settles it (whatever “it” is) and then he goes to sleep, like it’s just as easy as that.

Hawkeye stares at B.J. sleeping serenely. He looks their hands again, tangled together on B.J.’s pillow. Then he looks up at the ceiling.

“What the hell just happened?” he mouths at the ceiling.

He decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when the gift horse smells so nice and is holding his hand so sweetly. He shuffles a little closer, holds B.J.’s hand, and closes his eyes.

There’s a part of his brain that’s shouting at him about how this will destroy him in the morning. He tells it to shut the hell up. He’ll just have to write and ask Sidney to pencil him in for another session sooner than he thought.


End file.
